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THE 

DUTCH  COLONIAL 

HOUSE 


THE    COUNTRY    HOUSE   LIBRARY 

A  SERIES  OF  ARCHITECTURAL  BOOKS 

FOR  THE  LAYMAN 


2G1325 


The  front  entrance  of  the  Vreeland  house  at  NordhofF,  N.  J. 


THE 

DUTCH    COLONIAL 
HOUSE 


ITS  ORIGIN,  DESIGN,  MODERN  PLAN 
AND  CONSTRUCTION 

ILLUSTRATED  WITH  PHOTOGRAPHS  OF  OLD  EXAMPLES  AND 
AMERICAN  ADAPTATIONS  OF  THE  STYLE 


BY 

AYMAR  EMBURY,  II 

Aathor  of 
"One  Hundred  Country  Houses" 


NEW  YORK 

McBRIDE,  NAST  &  COMPANY 

1913 


/V4  1^75 

B.(a 


Copyright,  1913,  by 
McBride,  Nast  &  Co. 


t*oSlished; 'April,  1913 


^)  /^ 


Contents 


Page 

Introduction i 

The  Genesis  of  the  Style 1 

Materials 13 

The  Treatment  of  the  Roof 28 

Doors  and  Windows 47 

Plan 61 

The  Treatment  of  the  Principal  Rooms  ...  81 

Furniture  and  Decoration 93 


The  Illustrations 


The    front    entrance    of    the    Vreeland    house    at    Nordhoff, 

N.  J Frontispiece 

Facing  Page 

Bake-oven  of  stone  in  Dutch  Colonial  house 2 

The  Vreeland  house  at  NordhofF,  N.  J 3 

An  old  house  at  Hackensack,  N.  J 3 

The  Sneden  homestead  at  Sncden's  Landing 6 

An  old  farmhouse  at  Sparkill,  N.  Y. 6 

The  John  Peter  B.  Westervelt  house,  Cresskill,  N.  J.      .      .      .  7 

The  Brinckerhojff  homestead,  Hackensack 7 

House   at   Teaneck,   N.   J 10 

A  Dutch  variant  of  the  New  England  Colonial  at  Demarest, 

N.J 10 

Two  views  of  the  C.  Z.  Board  house  at  Hohokus,  N.  J.      .      .  11 

"Sunnyside,"    Hewlett,    L.    1 14 

An  old  Dutch  house  at  Hackensack,  N.  J 14 

Large  stucco  columns  at  New  Orleans,  La 15 

A  gambrel  roof  at  Chesterfield,  Md 15 

Brick  pavement  at  Cresskill,  N.  J 15 

The  Jerome  C.  Bull  house  at  Tiickahoe,  N.  Y 16 

The  Lydecker  homestead,  En.i;,lewood,  N.  J 17 

A  modern  house  with  gambrel  roof 17 

A  real  estate  company's  office 18 

The  Marie  house  at  Chappaqua,  N.  Y 19 

An  old  Dutch  house 19 

A  fireproof  house  of  Dutch  character  at  Riverdale,  N.  Y.      .      .  22 

A  summer  kitchen  of  shingles,  clapboards  and  stone      ...  23 

A  detail  showing  old  stonework  and  wooden  lintels  over  windows  23 

The  Lady  Moody  house  at  Gravesend,  L.  1 26 


THE  ILLUSTRATIONS 

Facing  Page 

A  modern  cottage  with  Dutch  roof 26 

The  Speer  residence  at  Los  Angeles,  Cal 27 

The  St.  George  Barber  house,  Englewood,  N.  J 28 

The  old  library  at  Stonington,  Conn 29 

A  gambrel  roof  on  the  main  house  and  single-pitched  roof  on 

extension          29 

Superimposed,  recessed  and  projecting  dormers      ....  32 

A  gable  roof  with  a  long  dormer 32 

The  residence  of  Dr.  Teeter,  Englewood,  N.  J 33 

A  house  at  Woodmere,  L.  1 33 

The  residence  of  Ernest  F.  Guilbert,  Newark,  N.  J.      .      .      .36 

A  house  at  Greenwich,  Conn 36 

A  house   at   Scarsdale,   N.  Y 37 

A  house  at  Garden  City,  L.  1 37 

The  Swift  residence,  Larchmont,  N.  Y 38 

A  house  at  Colonia,  N.  J .      .39 

A  house  at  Kensington,  L.  1 39 

A  house  at  Cynwyd,  Pa 40 

An  extreme  modernization  of  the  Dutch  type 40 

A  house  at  Sayville,  L.  1 41 

A  house  at  Fox  Point,  Wis 44 

A    gardener's    cottage 44 

An  old  house  at  Annapolis,  Md 45 

A  gable  end  of  typically  Dutch  shape 45 

The   Guilbert   house,   Newark 48 

An  old  Louisiana  plantation 48 

The  Bull  house,  Tuckahoe      .      . 49 

The  Orr  house  at  Garden  City,  L.  1 49 

A  house  at  Woodmere,  L.  1 50 

The  doorway  of  the  C.  S.  Fay  house 51 

Front  entrance  porch,  Gerrettsen  house,  Brooklyn,  N.  Y.      .      .  52 

The  entrance  door  of  the  Vreeland  house,  NordhofF,  N.  J.      .  52 

The  door  of  the  old  Cortelyou  house  at  Flatbush,  L.  I.     .      .      .  63 

The  doorway  of  the  Jordan  house  at  Kensington,  L.  I.      .      .  53 

A  simple  modem  doorway 66 


THE  ILLUSTRATIONS 

Facing  Page 
A  lovely  old  doorway  in  the  Vreeland  house      .      .      .      ►      .66 

A  doorway  in  the  Willett's  house  at  Flushing,  L.  I.      ...  57 

An  old  Dutch  doorway 67 

An  old  Dutch  house  with  "lie-on-your-stomach"  windows      .      .  58 

An  old  house  in  New  Jersey 58 

Excellent  traditional  treatment  of  windows  and  entrance  door  69 

The  Frederick  S.  Jordan  house  at  Kensington,  L,  I.      ...  64 

A  house  at  Kensington,  L.  I.          65 

A  well-equipped  country  place  near  Syracuse 70 

The  Stanley  G.  Flagg,  Jr.,  cottage  at  Stowe,  Pa 71 

The  residence  of  Henry  S.  Orr,  Garden  City,  L.  1 76 

The  Charles  J.  Fay  residence,  Dongan  Hills,  Staten  Island, 

N.    Y 77 

Living-room  in  the  Starr  house,  Tenafly,  N.  J 82 

Living-room  in  the  Orr  house 82 

An   old   enclosed   stairway 83 

A  fireplace  with  colored  tiles  from  Holland 83 

Hall  in  the  Stephen  Nash  house.  Short  Hills,  N.  J.      ...  84 

Dining-room  in  the  Guilbert  house 85 

A  corner  of  the  Lady  Moody  house  hall 85 

A  simple  fireplace  in  the  Gurd  house.  River  Edge,  N.  J.      .      .  88 

A  Colonial  mantel  in  the  Vreeland  house  at  NordhofF,  N.  J.      .  88 
A  Colonial  room  in  the  Marshall  Fry  house  at  Southampton, 

L.  1 89 

The  living-room  of  the  Lady  Moody  house 90 

The  stairway  in  the  King  house  at  Great  Neck,  L.  I.      ...  91 

The  hall  in  the  Orr  house  at  Garden  City,  L.  1 91 

Colonial  dressing  table 94 

A  Flemish  chest  of  drawers 94 

Colonial   bureau 94 

A   Colonial    rocker 95 

A    Georgian    armchair 95 

An  Adam  armchair 95 

A  William  and  Mary  armchair 95 

Flemish   caned  beds 98 


THE  ILLUSTRATIONS 

Facing  Page 

Beds  of  early  Dutch  type 98 

Colonial  four-poster 98 

Dutch   desk 98 

English  chest 98 

American  Empire  chairs 99 

Chairs  of  the  period  of  William  and  IMary 99 

A  living-kitchen  in  Holland 100 

A  living-room  in  the  John  A.  Gurd  house 100 

A  sideboard  of  the  period  of  William  and  Mary      ....  101 

A  china  closet  of  the  period  of  William  and  Mary      ....  101 

A  dining-room  in  the  King  house 104 

A  dining-room  in  old  Holland 104 

Dining-room  in  the  Starr  house 105 

Panelling  in  a  Holland  interior 105 

Wing    chair    with    valence 106 

Upholstered    chair 106 

Real  Colonial  Dutch  chairs 106 

Colonial  stand 107 

An   early  Dutch  table 107 

Sheraton   side   table      ...» 107 

English   gate-leg   table 107 


} 


THE 

DUTCH  COLONIAL 

HOUSE 


Introduction 


In  taking  up  the  subject  of  Dutch  Colonial  houses  as 
one  of  the  series  of  books  on  various  architectural  styles 
suited  to  country  work,  I  feel  that  a  few  words  of  gen- 
eral explanation  are  necessary.  Practically  speaking,  the 
Dutch  Colonial  house  passed  out  of  existence  one  hundred 
years  ago,  and  can  never  be  revived.  The  modern  houses 
which  we  denominate  as  "Dutch"  in  style  are  in  so  many 
respects  different  from  the  genuine  New  Jersey  farm- 
houses that  often  it  is  more  or  less  difficult  to  see  the  con- 
nection between  them.  The  principal  feature  which  dis- 
tinguishes them  as  descendants  of  Dutch  architecture  is 
their  emplo5rment  of  the  gambrel  roof,  but  it  is  used  not 
in  the  true  Dutch  manner,  rather  following  the  practice 
common  in  New  England — although  the  New  England 
type  was  itself  probably  derived  from  the  Dutch,  if  we  may 
trust  the  old  books  and  newspapers,  which  in  describing 
new  buildings  covered  with  these  characteristic  roofs  speak 
of  them  as  "Dutch."  Certain  types  of  Colonial  work  fit 
in  with  modem  needs  and  requirements  with  no  substantial 
change  in  their  general  composition,  and  the  evident  value 
of  these  houses  as  prototypes  for  modem  work  has  been 


I 


ii  INTRODUCTION 

very  fully  appreciated,  not  only  by  the  architects,  but  by 
the  public  at  large,  and  the  knowledge  and  sympathy  with 
New  England  Colonial  work  is  becoming  so  general  that 
at  times  we  almost  feel  as  if  the  Victorian  era  had  never  ex- 
isted, and  the  Colonial  tradition  had  persisted  unbroken. 
The  same  thing  cannot  truthfully  be  said  of  the  Dutch 
work;  there  is  a  distinct  break  between  the  traditional  type 
and  that  of  to-day,  but  that  some  of  our  most  interesting 
country  houses,  architecturally,  have  been  inspired  by 
Dutch  work  is  very  evident,  and  the  purpose  of  this  book 
is  to  illustrate  its  applicability  to  modern  construction, 
especially  in  the  smaller  types  of  houses. 

For  these  small  houses  there  is  probably  no  other  style 
so  good;  it  was  originally  devised  as  an  architecture  for 
small  buildings,  and  because  of  the  long  sloping  roofs,  with 
the  single  story  of  vertical  wall  surface,  it  appears  to  spring 
more  naturally  from  the  ground  than  would  any  building 
of  full  two  stories  and  of  the  same  ground  area.  What 
the  cultivated  American  public  desires  to-day  is  a  "long, 
low  house,"  and  as  lowness  is  dependent,  not  upon  the 
actual  height  in  feet  and  inches,  but  upon  the  relation  be- 
tween the  height  of  the  cornice  from  the  ground  and  the 
length  of  the  house,  it  is  not  very  diiRcult  to  secure  the 
effect  of  a  rather  long,  low  house  by  the  use  of  a  gambrel 
roof  starting  at  the  second  floor  line,  when  it  Would  be 
quite  impossible  to  secure  this  effect  in  a  building  of  two 


INTRODUCTION  iii 

full  stories.  The  style  is  the  only  one  which,  within  a  cer- 
tain rather  narrow  range  of  limitations,  perfectly  meets  re- 
quirements, since  it  is  the  only  one  which  gives  a  satisfactory 
second  story  under  the  sloping  roof.  Outside  of  these 
limits  I  freely  admit  that  other  types  better  meet  require- 
ments of  modern  living,  but  wherever  a  fairly  informal  and 
homelike  house  of  moderate  size — and  by  moderate  size  I 
mean  up  to  one  hundred  feet  in  length — is  preferred  to  a 
more  formal  type,  the  style  is  unsurpassed. 

There  are  given  in  the  book  a  great  many  illustrations 
of  the  old  houses  which  remain  to  us  in  the  counties  of  Ber- 
gen, Passaic,  Essex  and  Hudson  in  New  Jersey,  and  Kings 
and  Queens  in  Long  Island  and  New  York,  beside  a  cer- 
tain number  of  other  Colonial  houses  from  which  American* 
architects  have  borrowed,  perhaps  with  advantage,  to  add 
to  the  somewhat  limited  repertoire  of  the  Dutch  architec- 
ture. It  is  probably  impossible  to  pick  out  any  one  of 
these  old  houses  and  copy  it  exactly,  as  we  could  copy  a 
New  England  Colonial  house  if  we  so  desired;  but  archi- 
tecture in  this  country  at  the  present  day  is  by  no  means 
the  cut-and-dried  affair  that  it  was  only  a  few  years  since; 
we  are  endeavoring  to  reproduce,  not  the  form  but  the 
spirit,  and  in  considering  the  old  work  of  any  nation  or  of 
any  epoch,  we  try  to  get  at  not  just  how  the  thing  was  done, 
but  what  was  the  result  finally  achieved. 

The  Dutch  field  has  been  long  neglected,  probably  be- 


iv  INTRODUCTION 

cause  it  was  so  close  under  our  noses,  and  in  the  eager 
search  of  England,  Europe,  the  South  and  New  England 
for  inspiration,  we  have  overlooked  the  obvious.  It  is  only 
a  comparatively  few  American  architects,  who  for  some 
reason  have  had  the  old  Dutch  work  directly  called  to  their 
attention,  that  have  endeavored  to  work  out  a  new  applica- 
tion of  the  old  methods.  The  fact  that  the  results  obtained 
have  been  so  livable  and  so  artistic  speak  volumes  for  the 
flexibility  of  the  style,  which,  radically  changed  in  form, 
still  manages  to  preserve  its  identity,  and  it  is  with  the  hope 
that  more  Americans,  both  architects  and  their  clients,  may 
perceive  the  possibihties  of  the  work  that  this  book  has  been 
undertaken. 


The  Genesis  of  the  Style 


AMERICA  was  settled  by  very  diverse  elements, 
which  came  to  the  new  country  in  three  principal 
streams;  to  New  England  on  the  north,  Virginia 
on  the  south,  and  New  Holland  in  the  center  of  eastern 
America.  Curiously  enough  the  types  of  architecture  em- 
ployed by  all  three  of  these  settlements  bore  httle  resem- 
blance to  that  of  the  countries  from  which  they  came,  and 
while  the  settlers  both  in  New  England  and  Virginia  were 
of  common  blood  (although  in  sentiment  and  in  religious 
denomination  widely  separated) ,  the  types  which  they 
established  for  their  country  homes  in  their  new  land  re- 
sembled each  other  no  more  than  either  of  them  resembled 
the  architecture  of  the  Dutch  settlers  in  the  neighborhood 
of  New  York.  The  houses  were  unconscious  expressions 
of  the  new  conditions,  and  were  in  most  cases  so  simple  and 
unostentatious  that  it  may  be  that,  in  speaking  of  most  of 
them,  "architecture"  is  too  dignified  a  term  to  employ,  since 
the  term  implies  a  conscious  attempt  towards  artistic  ex- 
pression in  these  buildings. 

To  anyone  interested  in  the  early  life  of  our  Colonial 
ancestors  the  thing  which  will  most  immediately  appeal  as 

1 


2  THE  DUTCH  COLONIAL  HOUSE 

interesting  and  extraordinary  is,  as  said  before,  the  un- 
likeness  of  most  of  the  Colonial  buildings  to  those  of  the 
parent  countries.  We  have,  fortunately,  preserved  to  us 
a  considerable  number  of  the  old  houses  and  a  few  of  the 
public  buildings,  in  most  cases  not  of  the  years  immedi- 
ately following  the  first  settlement.  However,  when  one 
considers  that  settlement  in  America  was  not  a  process 
which  took  place  once  and  for  all  and  then  ceased,  leaving 
the  Colonists  with  only  tradition  to  recall  to  them  the  styles 
of  their  parent  countries;  but  was  a  continuing  process  dur- 
ing which  there  was  a  constant  addition  of  Colonists  born 
and  brought  up  in  England  and  in  Europe,  thoroughly 
familiar  with  the  styles  of  houses  there  customary,  it  is 
amazing  indeed  to  find  how  easily  they  fell  into  the  ver- 
nacular architecture  of  the  time,  so  that  its  growth  was 
apparently,  as  far  as  country  houses  went,  little  influenced 
by  foreign  ideas,  and,  even  when  so  influenced,  these  ideas 
were  transmuted  into  forms  quite  unlike  those  of  the  home 
countries.  Thus  we  find  Mount  Vernon,  the  best  known 
of  all  our  American  country  houses,  because  of  the  unique 
position  its  builder  enjoys  in  American  history,  absolutely 
unlike  not  only  the  English  country  houses  constructed  at 
the  same  period,  but  those  of  any  date.  This  very  radical 
change  in  architectural  ideas  has  been  attributed  to  various 
causes;  for  example,  to  the  climatic  conditions,  to  the 
changed  list  of  convenient  materials,  to  the  fact  that  skilled 


J      »t»'  J  *•'  I  '»• 


The  bake-oven  of  stone  on  the  gable  end.     The  front  of  stucco,  the  rest 

of  clapboards 


An  old  house  at  Gravesend,  L.  I.,  covered  with  wide  white  shingles 


The  Vreeland  house  at  NordhofF,  N.  J.     An  excellent  example  of  the  late 
Dutch  work.     Date,  1812 


An  old  house  at  Hackensack,  N.  J.,  built  of  many  materials.     Date,  1732 


THE  GENESIS  OF  THE  STYLE  3 

mechanics  were  scarce  and  many  of  the  houses  were  built 
by  amateur  craftsmen,  and  to  numerous  other  causes.  The 
probability  is  that  all  of  these  carried  weight,  but  I  think 
that  the  principal  reason  for  the  change  in  style  was  the 
absolute  break  in  the  traditional  life  of  the  people. 

The  seventeenth  and  eighteenth  centuries  were  years 
when  architecture  as  a  profession  could  scarcely  be  said  to 
exist,  and  architects  as  such  were  employed  only  for  build- 
ings of  considerable  importance.  The  lovely  little  English 
cottages,  of  which  we  see  so  many,  of  the  seventeenth,  and 
eighteenth  centuries  in  England,  were  not  designed  at  all, 
but  were  built  without  plans  by  local  carpenters  and  masons, 
who  learned  their  trades  from  their  parents  and  handed 
their  skill  and  traditions  to  their  children  until  they  con- 
stituted almost  a  caste  of  their  own.  Men  of  these  classes 
were  scarce  among  the  early  imml<T^rants,  who  came  in  the 
main  from  the  cities,  and  in  New  England  were  of  the  shop- 
keeping  and  manufacturing  classes,  rather  than  mechanics, 
or,  when  mechanics,  were  those  familiar  with  city  and  not 
country  work. 

Virginia,  of  course,  as  we  learned  from  our  school  his- 
tories, was  founded  by  so-called  gentlemen  adventurers, 
people  without  trades  and  without  any  productive  excuse 
for  being.  The  mechanics  there  were  mostly  transported 
and  indentured  men,  who,  criminals  in  their  own  country, 
became  under  favorable  circumstances  at  least  useful  and 


4  THE  DUTCH  COLONIAL  HOUSE 

excellent  citizens  in  the  new.  In  New  Amsterdam  and  the 
Dutch  colonies  around  it,  the  first  comers  were  merchants, 
traders  of  furs  and  the  like,  to  whom  were  soon  added  many 
of  the  Dutch  peasants,  the  ancestors  of  the  sturdy  farmers 
of  New  York  and  Long  Island.  Thus,  among  the  earliest 
settlers,  in  no  one  of  these  three  parts  of  the  country  was 
there  any  great  proportion  of  the  mechanics,  who  in  their 
native  villages  preserved  the  traditional  styles;  and  requir- 
ing houses,  the  settlers  must  needs  build  them  as  best  they 
might. 

Just  why  conditions  not  at  all  dissimilar  in  Virginia,  New 
Jersey  and  Massachusetts  should  have  produced  types  so 
radically  unlike,  is  hard  to  tell,  but  what  we  do  know  is  that 
in  each  of  these  three  centers  was  developed  a  certain  style 
of  house,  not  very  flexible  in  design,  and  each  of  which  has 
furnished  a  mine  of  material  for  the  country  house  archi- 
tects of  this  later  day.  To  me  the  most  curious  of  the  re- 
sulting anachronisms  was  the  rather  extraordinary  exchange 
of  materials  between  the  various  settlements.  Everybody 
knows  that  Holland  was  preeminently  the  land  of  brick 
construction,  but  I  do  not  recall  a  single  Dutch  farm- 
house built  entirely  of  brick,  although  I  do  know  of  two  or 
three  in  which  some  brick  was  used  elsewhere  than  in  the 
chimneys.  On  the  other  hand  the  English  country  cot- 
tages were  built  largely  of  stone,  or  of  stucco  over  stone, 
with  a  considerable  amount  of  half- timber  construction; 


THE  GENESIS  OF  THE  STYLE  '  6 

that  is,  a  heavy  wooden  framework  filled  in  between  the 
uprights  with  brick  and  plaster.  I  do  not  recall  in  all 
the  South,  or  in  fact  anywhere  else  in  this  country,  a  build- 
ing of  half -timber  construction  in  the  English  sense.  The 
typical  Southern  house  was  of  brick,  and,  in  most  of  the 
earlier  cases,  of  brick  imported  from  England.  In  New 
England,  wooden  construction  was  universal  in  the  country 
districts,  although  old  England  itself  has  not  had,  since  the 
time  of  the  Romans,  forests  enough  to  furnish  even  interior 
woodwork  for  the  English  houses,  and  certainly  the  clap- 
board and  shingle  house  is  almost  never  seen  there.  In 
Virginia  there  were  probably  no  fewer  trees  than  in  New 
England,  and  as  to  why  the  Virginians  did  not  use  wood 
as  freely  as  the  New  Englander  we  have  no  information, 
although  a  guess  that  the  Virginian,  vain  of  his  assumed 
superior  station  in  life,  sought  to  imitate  the  English  houses 
of  those  of  similar  station,  may  not  be  far  wrong.  This 
surmise  is  perhaps  strengthened  by  the  fact  that  in  so  far 
as  the  Virginia  architecture  resembled  that  of  England  at 
all,  it  was  that  of  the  town  and  not  of  the  country,  and  it 
was  certainly  the  towns  with  which  the  Virginians  Were 
most  familiar.  It  is  nevertheless  curious  to  find  that  in  the 
early  Colonial  work  stucco  was  practically  unused  in  Vir- 
ginia and  New  England,  but  was  occasionally  found  in 
Philadelphia,  and  was  at  least  not  uncommon  around  New 
York,  in  spite  of  the  fact  that  the  Dutch  were  primarily  a 


6  THE  DUTCH  COLONIAL  HOUSE 

race  of  brickbiiilders.     In  such  curious  facts  as  these  lies  one 
of  the  most  interesting  phases  of  architectural  history. 

In  searching  for  the  genesis  of  the  Dutch  style  we  look 
for  it  first  in  the  consideration  of  materials  at  hand. 
Northeastern  New  Jersey  was  at  some  remote  age  the  ter- 
mination of  the  glacial  drift,  and  the  fertile  fields  which 
offered  such  an  alluring  bait  to  the  Dutch  settler  were  cov- 
ered with  red  sandstone,  not  native  to  the  country,  buD 
brought  there  long  ago  by  the  glaciers.  These  stones  had 
to  be  removed  from  the  fields  before  these  could  conveniently 
be  worked,  and  since  they  had  to  be  moved,  in  the  natural 
sequence  of  things  it  was  as  convenient  to  pile  them  on  top 
of  each  other  to  form  walls  for  the  fields  and  walls  for  the 
house,  as  to  dispose  of  them  in  any  other  way.  The  earliest 
Dutch  farmhouses  in  New  Jersey  are,  then,  of  stone.  In 
Long  Island,  on  the  other  hand,  building  stone  was  about 
as  common  as  diamonds,  and  the  houses  were  built  of  w^^d 
and  covered  either  with  shingles  or  with  clapboards,  al- 
though in  a  few  cases  a  frame  wall  was  filled  in  with  brick 
and  plastered  over  the  whole  surface — the  wood  as  well  as 
the  masonry.  The  New  Jersey  type  of  construction  very 
probably  led  to  the  development  of  the  most  familiar  char- 
acteristic of  Dutch  work,  the  long  overhanging  roof.  In 
building  their  walls  the  early  settlers  did  not  have  proper 
materials  with  which  to  build ;  lime  had  to  be  imported,  and 
cement  had  not  yet  been  invented;  time  and  labor  they  did 


•''r*,}'''il 


The  Sneden  homestead  at  Sneden's  Landing  on  the  Hudson  River 
Date,  about  1700 


An  old  farmhouse  at  Sparkill,  X.  Y.,  with  a  single-pitclied 
Date^  about  1750 


ft      (- 


A  perfect  example  of  the  old  Dutch  farmhouse — the  John  Peter  B.  W-estervelt 
house.  Cresskill,  N.  J.     Date,  about  1800 


Columns  at  the  porch  only.     Tlie  BrinckerhofF  homestead,  Haekensack,  N.  J. 

Date,  1704 


THE  GENESIS  OF  THE  STYUE  7 

have,  and  in  consequence  instead  of  being  built  of  rough, 
irregularly  shaped  stones,  with  the  interstices  filled  with 
mortar,  their  walls  were  built  of  square  stones  with  level 
beds,  competent  to  stand  without  any  cementing  together, 
and  secured  against  intrusion  of  the  wind  and  rain  by  the 
filling  of  the  chinks  with  clay,  just  as  had  been  the  case  in 
the  log  cabins  which  had  been  their  first  homes. 

Clay  in  a  dry  climate  is  nearly  as  good  a  material  for 
waU  building  as  cement,  but  exposed  to  the  weather  under 
the  axrtion  of  rain  and  frost,  it  soon  disintegrates  and 
washes  out.  To  protect  it  from  moisture  the  settlers  there- 
fore extended  the  roofs,  a  condition  which,  in  the  two-story 
houses  of  Philadelphia,  led  to  the  development  of  the 
familiar  "Germantown  hood,"  since  a  single  projection  at 
the  top  of  the  house  was  not  sufficient  to  protect  the  full 
height  of  the  waU,  and  a  secondary  roof  had  to  be  intro- 
duced at  the  second-story  level.  As  the  Dutch  houses  were 
nearly  all  of  a  single  story  height  below  the  roof,  a  single  long 
overhang  was  sufficient,  and  at  first  this  was  a  straight  con- 
tinuation of  the  main  roof;  they  were  later  swung  out  in  a 
wide  sweeping  curve  whose  purpose  is  not  at  once  apparent, 
but  which  was  probably  intended  to  raise  the  eaves  suf- 
ficiently above  the  windows  to  permit  the  rooms  to  be  fully 
lighted. 

The  earliest  houses  had  roofs  of  a  single  pitch;  the  later 
ones  were  covered  with  the  familiar  gambrel  shape,  so  oom- 


8  THE  DUTCH  COLONIAL  HOUSE 

monly  associated  with  the  Dutch  farmhouses  as  to  be  called 
a  "Dutch"  roof,  although  it  was  by  no  means  uncommon 
in  New  England,  and  not  entirely  absent  from  Pennsyl- 
vania and  the  South.  This  gambrel  roof  is  America's 
principal  contribution  to  the  science  of  building;  it  was 
almost,  if  not  absolutely,  unknown  in  Europe,  including 
England,  and  if  any  cases  did  occur  there  they  were  not 
a  part  of  the  real  development  of  architecture,  but  were 
sporadic  and  without  real  influence  in  the  evolution  of  any 
style.  As  a  contribution  to  country  house  design,  espe- 
cially for  small  houses,  it  is  invaluable,  for  the  reason  which 
probably  caused  its  invention,  since  it  permits  a  greatly  in- 
creased space  in  the  second  story  without  making  a  roof  of 
tremendous  height.  The  Dutch  always  applied  this  method 
of  construction  rather  timidly,  the  lower  set  of  rafters  being 
pitched  not  much  more  than  the  upper  set,  and  the  gain  of 
space  was  correspondingly  inconsiderable,  but  its  employ- 
ment in  the  Dutch  fashion,  with  the  ends  of  the  rafters  still 
swinging  out  into  a  wide  curve  to  protect  the  walls,  pro- 
duced a  roof  shape  of  peculiar  beauty,  which  can  seldom 
now-a-days  be  imitated,  because  of  the  labor  involved  in 
curving  the  rafter  ends,  and  because  the  pitch  is  too  flat 
to  give  good  space  for  rooms  below  it. 

As  the  style  developed,  these  roofs  were  not  uncommonly 
extended,  on  one  side  at  least,  far  enough  to  give  space  for 
a  narrow  porch  or  piazza,  and  were  supported  on  columns. 


THE  GENESIS  OF  THE  STYUE  9 

Sometimes  there  was  only  a  single  pair  flanking  the  en- 
trance door  (of  which  type  there  is  one  example  illustrated) , 
designed  apparently  to  emphasize  the  entrance;  but  more 
commonly,  as  in  the  Demarest  and  Vreeland  houses,  the 
roof  was  upheld  by  a  row  of  square  columns  which  added 
inmiensely  to  the  picturesque  appearance  of  the  front. 

The  latest  development  of  the  Dutch  farmhouse  before  v 
it  fell,  with  the  rest  of  the  world's  architecture,  into  the 
wretched  tastelessness  of  the  Victorian  era,  was  charac- 
terized by  the  reduction  of  the  cornice  projection  and  the 
introduction  of  a  row  of  second-story  windows  along  the 
front,  usually  of  the  low  kind  sometimes  called  "lie-on- 
your-stomach"  windows;  the  projecting  hood  of  the  piazza 
was  then  placed  between  the  windows  of  the  second  story 
and  those  of  the  first. 

Another  curious  development  of  this  period  was  that  at 
this  piazza  roof  line  the  material  often  changed;  below  the 
roof  it  was  still  of  stone,  while  above  it  it  was  of  wood. 
This  last  change  in  the  Dutch  farmhouse  may  be  attributed 
to  two  causes:  first,  the  introduction  of  good  lime  mortar, 
which  did  away  with  the  necessity  of  protecting  the  wall 
surfaces,  although  many  shingle  and  wooden  houses  which 
needed  no  protection,  had,  because  of  the  strength  of  the 
tradition  previously  established,  been  built  with  them;  and 
second,  because  the  Dutch  no  longer  constituted  an  isolated 
community,  but  in  the  early  years  of  the  nineteenth  cen- 


10  THE  DUTCH  COLONIAL  HOUSE 

tury  gradually  became  familiar  with  current  Colonial  work 
of  all  parts  of  the  United  States,  and  especially  of  New 
England,  so  that  its  provincial  characteristics  disappeared, 
and  about  1820  or  1830  the  work  around  New  York  had 
little  to  distinguish  it  from  the  Neo-classic  which  then  con- 
stituted the  national  style. 

In  detail  indeed,  the  Dutch  work  was  very  widely  dif- 
ferent from  that  of  the  rest  of  the  Colonists,  and  although 
no  Colonial  architecture,  either  in  mass  or  in  detail,  was 
very  subservient  to  tradition,  the  Dutch  was  perhaps  the 
freest  of  all.  Taking,  for  example,  such  an  importanJ 
piece  of  the  design  as  the  column  shapes,  we  find  that  in/ 
the  South  they  followed  the  classic  proportion  quite  closely; 
in  New  England,  while  the  classic  forms  were  in  a  rough 
way  retained,  the  proportions  were  tremendously  attenu- 
ated ;  and  in  both  sections  the  columns  were  generally  round 
and  often  fluted.  This  was  not  characteristic  of  Dutch 
work;  many  of  the  old  columns  were  octagonal  and  hexa- 
gonal, with  the  capitals  totally  unlike  the  classic,  and 
strongly  reminiscent  of  Gothic  work.  Side  by  side  with 
these  curious  examples,  which  are  not  found  elsewhere  than 
in  Dutch  houses,  we  find  the  square  carpenter-built  type 
of  columns,  sometimes  with  paneled  sides,  and  sometimes 
plain,  common  to  all  late  Colonial  styles.  The  doorways 
of  the  earlier  houses  were  only  rarely  ornamented,  but  with 
the  growth  of  wealth  and  knowledge,  the  Dutch  made  quite 


The  last  type  of  Dutch  work.     House  at  Teaneck,  N.  J.,  built  about  18^0 


A  Dutch  variant  of  the    Xi  u   England  Colonial  at   Dtuiarcsl,  X.  J. 
Date^  about  17P5 


The  finest  old  garden  in  the  neighborhood  of  New  York      lln    C  .  Z.   Hiard 
house  at  Hohokus,  N.  J. 


The  C.  Z.  Board  house  at  Hohokus.    An  unusually  lar<^c  country  place 

built  in  1754 


THE  GENESIS  OF  THE  STYLE  11 

as  much  of  their  doors — ^although  in  somewhat  different 
fashion — as  did  their  New  Enp^land  confreres. 

The  style  never  was,  and  never  can  be,  perfectly  ad- 
justed to  houses  of  great  size  or  formal  character;  it  was 
essentially  informal  and  picturesque.  The  genius  of  the 
Dutch  race  did  not  lend  itself  to  formality  in  building  any 
more  than  it  did  to  the  pomp  of  public  life;  we  do  not  find 
in  HoDand  itself  any  buildings,  either  private  or  public,  of 
such  a  character;  the  Dutch  simply  do  not  know  how  to  be 
stately.  But  if  a  country  house  is  wanted  which  shall  be 
homelike,  quaint  and  lovely,  the  style  is  admirably  adjusted 
to  its  use,  especially  since  in  a  small  house  the  lower  the 
roof  comes,  the  more  intimately  the  building  will  fit  its 
landscape,  and  houses  of  the  Dutch  type  are  essentially  low 
in  appearance.  Up  to  a  certain  size  the  style  certainly  has 
possibilities  beyond  the  ordinary,  and  even  for  a  house  as 
big  as  the  Board  house  it  can  hardly  be  surpassed. 

Before  concluding  this  chapter  on  the  genesis  of  the  style, 
I  Want  to  say  a  little  about  this,  which  is  perhaps  the  finest 
of  all  the  Dutch  places  still  existing.  Like  most  of  the 
Dutch  houses  it  is  placed  with  its  gable  end  close  to  the 
road,  and  consists  of  a  low  central  mass  with  a  gambrel 
roof,  flanked  by  two  still  lower  wings  with  simple  roofs  of 
single  pitch.  The  lower  story  in  the  main  part  of  the  build- 
ing is  of  stone,  stuccoed  under  the  piazza  on  the  side  which 
is  shown  in  the  illustration,  on  the  other  side  pointed  up 


la  THE  DUTCH  COLONIAL  HOUSE 

with  mortar  joints.  The  wings  are  of  frame,  probably 
built  long  after  the  rest  of  the  house.  The  entrance  drive 
passes  by  the  long  piazza,  and  across  the  drive  from  the 
main  piazza  is  what  I  believe  to  be  the  finest  old  formal 
garden  in  America,  symmetrical  in  plan,  the  paths  edged 
with  box  trees,  and  the  intersections  of  the  paths  strength- 
ened by  trellised  arches,  while  a  summer-house  marks  the 
center.  The  garden  is  raised  above  the  public  street  by 
a  stone  terrace  wall  surmounted  by  a  wooden  fence.  On 
the  other  long  side  of  the  house  a  small  porch  faces  a  plain 
lawn  studded  with  tremendous  and  magnificent  trees.  It 
is  a  place  quite  as  important  architecturally  as  any  of  the 
famous  Virginia  houses,  but  possibly  because  of  its  near- 
ness to  New  York,  and  possibly  because  it  is  not  associated 
with  any  historic  incident,  it  has  passed  almost  unnoticed, 
although  in  its  setting  and  surroundings  it  is  very  superior 
to  many  of  the  famous  Southern  houses.  In  itself  it  is  ex- 
quisitely designed,  and  not  less  beautifully  detailed.  It 
is  the  sort  of  house  which  one  should  seek  to  have  in  the 
country,  unostentatious,  elegant  and  comfortable;  the  home 
of  a  gentleman. 


Materials 

THERE  is  no  single  factor  in  the  construction  of 
the  old  Dutch  houses  to  which  more  of  their 
pleasing  effect  is  due,  than  the  materials  of  which 
they  were  built.  This  is  not  because  they  selected  a  single 
material  which  seemed  absolutely  appropriate  to  the  style 
and  held  fast  to  it,  but  because  every  material  which  they 
used  was  so  delightfully  handled. 

We  find  in  New  England  that  a  great  part  of  the  charm 
of  the  Colonial  houses  is  determined  by  the  color  scheme 
of  white  with  green  blinds  and  roof,  and  that  the  materials 
were  clapboards  and  shingles,  the  former  for  the  walls  and 
the  latter  for  the  roofs.  While  there  are  a  goodly  number 
of  New  England  houses  of  which  the  walls  are  shingled  and 
possibly  even  some  few  of  which  the  walls  were  of  brick, 
the  prevalence  of  clapboards  for  the  side  walls  was  so  strong 
as  to  constitute  a  type;  similarly  the  typical  Southern 
house  is  of  brick.  Another  thing,  which  is  noticeable  in 
both  New  England  and  the  South,  is  that  the  same  material 
was  used  for  all  parts  of  the  building;  this  sounds  like  such 
a  reasonable  thing  to  do  that  one  is  surprised  to  find  that 
in  the  Dutch  colonies  it  was  just  about  the  last  thing  they 

13 


14  THE  DUTCH  COLONIAL  HOUSE 

did.  Of  course  there  were  certain  localities,  especially  in 
Long  Island,  where  only  a  single  material  was  available, 
and  the  houses  were  accordingly  corered  with  shingles ;  but 
where  a  variety  of  materials  was  available  one  may  be  sure 
that  the  Dutch  did  not  forget  them.  The  little  summer 
kitchen  at  Cresskill,  New  Jersey,  for  example,  a  building 
certainly  not  over  fifteen  feet  by  seventeen  or  eighteen  feet, 
has  four  of  the  five  possible  materials  used  in  its  exterior; 
the  end  walls  are  of  stone,  the  front  and  back  of  clap- 
boards, the  roof  of  shingles,  and  the  chimney  of  brick. 
While  I  do  not  find  among  the  illustrations  at  hand  any 
in  which  all  five  materials  were  used  in  the  lower  walls 
alone,  there  are  such  houses  still  in  existence,  and  it  is  by 
no  means  so  rare  as  to  excite  comment  to  find  a  farmhouse 
where  the  end  walls  are  of  stone,  the  front  of  stucco,  the 
back  of  shingles  and  one  extension  of  clapboards  and 
another  of  brick.  The  old  farmhouse  in  Hackensack, 
illustrated  in  this  chapter,  shows  three  of  the  materials  used 
in  conjunction,  the  lower  part  of  the  walls  being  of  stone, 
the  front  of  stucco,  and  the  gable  of  shingles;  while'  the 
Lady  Moody  house  has  the  gable  ends  of  shingles  and  front 
and  rear  walls  (protected  by  the  overhanging  hood)  of 
stucco. 

Quite  a  common  trick  among  the  Dutch  builders  appears 
to  have  been  to  construct  a  square  block  enclosure  of  stone 
up  to  the  height  of  the  bottom  of  the  rafters,  and  then  to 


'  i  f*  » •  ' 


"Sunnyside,"  Hewlett,  L.  I.,  built  of  stucco,  brick  and  shingles  in  an  interesting 

combination 


An  old  Dutch  house  at  Hackensack,  N.  J.,  with  entrance  porcli  and  side  piazza 


0 

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MATERIALS  16 

finish  the  gable  end  walls  with  shinpjles  or  clapboards,  a 
type  illustrated  in  the  houses  at  Cresskill  and  Demarest. 
The  material  varied  with  the  locality;  the  Dutch  had  no 
hard-and-fast  rules  about  appropriate  materials,  but  were 
governed  entirely  by  what  was  convenient  and  easily  ob- 
tained. This  flexibility  in  the  use  of  materials  affords  the 
modern  architect  wide  latitude  in  his  choice,  and  that  the 
architects  of  to-day  have  very  fully  availed  themselves  of 
this  privilege  will  be  later  shown;  but  even  with  the  much 
greater  command  of  materials  of  the  present  day,  we  have 
still  failed  to  reach  the  interesting  qualities  of  the  older 
work.  I  think  of  all  the  materials  used  in  these  houses  the 
most  agreeable  and  most  valuable  to  study  was  the  red 
sandstone  of  which  many  of  the  Dutch  houses  in  Bergen 
and  Essex  Counties  in  New  Jersey  were  built.  This  is 
due  to  two  reasons:  first,  the  interesting  character  of  the 
stone  itself,  which,  as  it  was  not  a  quarry  stone,  came  in  a 
wide  range  of  shades  from  which  the  Dutch  masons  made 
no  attempt  to  select  those  of  uniform  color;  and  second, 
because  of  the  very  excellent  way  in  which  these  were  cut 
and  laid. 

Two  photographs  of  portions  of  the  Westervelt  house 
illustrate,  as  far  as  any  photographs  without  color  can,  the 
method  employed.  One  observes  immediately  that  the  main 
portion  of  the  building  was  better  executed  than  the 
extensions,  and  although  there  is  a  difference  of  some  fifty 


16  THE  DUTCH  COLONIAL  HOUSE 

years  in  the  dates  of  these  two  parts  of  the  building,  this 
does  not  account  for  the  variety  of  workmanship.  The 
Dutch  certainly  believed  in  putting  their  best  foot  fore- 
most, and  we  invariably  find  that  the  entrance  fronts  of 
the  houses  are  of  better  material  and  of  better  workman- 
ship than  the  sides  and  rear,  and  where  extensions  are  added 
these  commonly  followed  in  workmanship  the  rear  of  the 
house.  It  has  been  a  source  of  a  great  deal  of  speculation 
as  to  how  in  these  valleys,  which,  fertile  as  they  may  have 
been,  could  never  have  made  the  possessors  of  the  small 
farms  into  which  they  were  divided  very  wealthy,  the 
farmers  could  have  afforded  to  construct  their  buildings 
of  materials  so  finely  executed.  The  stonework  in  the  main 
fronts  of  these  buildings  was  beautifully  cut,  carefully 
squared,  with  a  finely  finished  surface,  and  laid  so  close  as 
hardly  to  require  mortar..  The  sides  and  backs  of  the 
buildings  were  also  laid  of  squared  stone,  but  of  much 
rougher  surface,  and  with  a  much  wider  joint,  needing  no 
such  careful  surfacing  of  the  top  and  bottom  as  did  the 
better  finished  ones.  The  stones  vary  in  color  from  a  rich 
purplish  red  to  a  light  brownish  yellow,  and  while  the 
courses  are  as  a  rule  kept  at  uniform  heights,  the  stones 
are  all  sorts  of  difi'erent  lengths,  although  they  are  always 
laid  to  retain  the  bond ;  that  is  to  say,  each  stone  overlaps 
the  ones  above  and  below  it  and  no  two  vertical  joints  come 
on  the  same  line.     Now-a-days  the  effort  is  always  made 


Octagonal  porch  columns  supporting  the  overhang  on  the  Lydecker  homestead 

Englewood^  N.  J. 


A  modern  house  two  stories  high  with  gambrel  roof  and  Dutch  materials 


MATERIALS  17 

to  miake  window-sills  of  a  single  piece  in  masonry  houses 
of  any  kind,  but  in  the  older  houses,  while  sometimes  full 
stone  sills  were  built  in,  as  a  rule  the  window  openings  were 
simply  punched  through  the  wall,  and  no  especial  provision 
made  for  sills.  This  was  distinctly  bad  practice,  since  rain 
running  over  the  top  of  the  upper  joints,  especially  with- 
out cement  mortar,  washes  out  the  crevices  and  makes  the 
walls  leak.  But  the  most  curious  feature  to  be  observed 
in  the  stonework  was  the  fact  that  stone  lintels  were  un- 
common, their  places  being  taken  by  hewn  chestnut  or  oak 
beams.  In  looking  at  the  photograph  of  the  end  of  the 
Westervelt  house,  we  find  what  is  apparently  a  lintel  with 
a  carved  key  block;  as  a  matter  of  fact  it  is  merely  of 
board,  covering  the  rough  wooden  lintel,  and  painted  and 
sanded  to  imitate  stone.  This  feature  was  not  unique  in 
the  Westervelt  house,  but  was  common  practice  in  all  the 
stone  farmhouses,  and  indeed  in  Colonial  stone  houses  in 
all  parts  of  the  country,  and  I  have  observed  similar 
methods  of  treatment  of  the  lintels  in  localities  as  far  sep- 
arated as  Germantown  and  North  Carolina. 

The  shingles  used  were  always  hand-split  shingles,  and 
of  great  durability,  the  original  shingles  in  many  cases  still 
being  in  good  condition  after  one  hundred  years  of  use. 
To  the  roughness  of  their  surfaces,  especially  when  white- 
washed, may  be  attributed  the  interesting  character  of  the 
frame  Dutch  work.     The  stucco  that  the  builders  used,  on 


18  THE  DUTCH  COLONIAL  HOUSE 

the  other  hand,  was  a  very  perishable  material,  similar  to 
the  old-fashioned  lime  plaster  of  our  interiors,  and  was 
in  constant  need  of  repairs,  especially  at  the  bottom, 
which  was  not  fully  protected  by  the  overhanging  roofs. 
These  repairs  were  concealed  by  the  lavish  use  of  white- 
wash. 

Another  of  the  reasons  for  the  very  picturesque  quality 
of  many  of  these  old  houses  is  to  be  found  in  their  lovely 
color  schemes,  which  were  again  the  result,  not  of  fore- 
thought, but  of  a  happy  limitation  in  the  choice  of  materials. 
We  all  know  the  dull  blue  green  of  the  blinds ;  this  was  not 
their  original  color,  but  is  simply  the  fading  out  of  the 
most  brilliant  of  all  greens — so-called  Paris  green,  or  oxide 
of  copper,  which  was  the  only  cheap  green  then  available. 
That  and  whitewash  and  red  oxide  of  iron  were  about  the 
only  colors  they  had  at  hand,  and  were  we  to  use  these 
colors  as  the  Dutch  must  have  used  them  one  hundred 
years  ago,  the  effect  would  be  startling  in  the  extreme. 
The  oxide  of  iron  paint  is  a  brilliant  vermallion;  white- 
wash, about  the  whitest  white  known;  and  the  green,  a  raw 
pea  green.  Time  has  softened  these  colors  into  harmony, 
not  only  with  each  other,  but  with  the  grayish  black  to 
which  the  roofs  have  turned  and  the  pleasant  reds  and 
browns  of  the  stonework,  which  was  relieved  by  pointing 
up  with  white  mortar  composed  of  lime  and  sand.  Now 
we  consciously  imitate  these  colors,  and  seek  to  produce 


a 

C 

o 


hi 

a 


5£ 

o 


a, 

S 
o 


O 


?  «  ?  "ci  *     5   '»  •        •    «-e' 


Alfred  Bussellc,  architect 
The  Marie  house  at  Cliappaqua,  N.  Y. — stone,  stucco  and  shingles 


An  old  Dutcli  house  with  the  same  combination  of  materials  as  the  modern  house 

above 


MATERIALS  19 

and  sometimes  actually  do  produce  the  quiet  and  yet  rather 
daring  harmonies  of  the  old  color  schemes. 

The  modem  houses  of  so-called  Dutch  character  are  for 
various  reasons  quite  different  from  the  genuine  old  ones, 
the  principal  one  being  in  the  roof  shape,  as  will  be  ex- 
plained in  a  subsequent  chapter;  but  not  a  small  part  of 
the  change  lies  in  the  fact  that  we  have  unconsciously 
adopted  into  our  flock  of  Dutch  prototypes  a  number 
drawn  from  other  sources.  The  big  round  columns,  for 
example,  used  by  Mr.  Keen  in  the  Woodmere  Land  Com- 
pany's office,  and  by  Mr.  Gardner,  have  no  place  in  the 
strictly  Dutch  type,  but  are  adaptations  from  any  one  of 
three  possible  sources,  of  which  the  well-known  Italian 
stucco  colunms  used  for  supporting  trellises  in  the  vine- 
yards are  the  most  probable;  although  the  other  two  are 
both  American  types.  It  was  not  uncommon  in  eastern 
Pennsylvania  to  fmd  the  lower  story  of  farm  barns  used 
as  wagon  sheds,  and  the  upper  stories  supported  on  fat 
stuccoed  columns;  while  the  illustration  of  the  old  house 
on  the  Bayou  St.  John  at  New  Orleans,  illustrated  in  this 
chapter,  is  a  familiar  Southern  type  which  may  have  been 
incorporated,  perhaps  unconsciously,  into  the  modem  work. 
These  big  columns  have  become  almost  a  distinctive  feature 
of  the  type  of  current  architecture  generally  classed  as 
"Dutch,"  although  I  must  confess  that  with  a  few  excep- 
tions, most  of  it,  including  my  own  work,  shows  little  re- 


20  THE  DUTCH  COLONIAL  HOUSE 

semblance  to  the  original  style  whose  name  it  bears.  The 
most  we  can  claim  for  the  modem  work  is  that  it  is,  to 
some  extent  at  least,  Dutch  in  spirit,  and  the  sort  of  thing 
which  the  Dutch  architects  might  have  done  had  they  hap- 
pened to  think  of  it.  It  is  a  fact  that  none  of  the  other 
Colonial  types  was  handled  by  the  designers  with  anything 
like  the  freedom  from  traditional  precedent  that  the  Dutch 
work  showed,  and  it  is  because  the  modern  interpreters  of 
the  Dutch  work  have  not  hesitated  to  use  the  style  with  the 
same  freedom,  that  makes  some  of  the  modern  so-called 
Dutch  houses  interesting  and  picturesque.  About  the 
only  thing  which  is  really  a  common  meeting-ground  in 
both  the  old  and  the  new  work,  is  the  use  of  a  gambrel  roof, 
and  a  certain  picturesque  and  informal  method  of  treat- 
ment in  which  perhaps  lies  its  strongest  claim,  not  to  sim- 
ilarity, but  to  a  continuation  of  the  traditions.  Much  of 
the  modem  work  bears  a  closer  resemblance  to  the  gambrel- 
roofed  brick  houses  at  Chesterfield,  Maryland,  than  it  does 
to  the  genuine  Dutch  architecture  of  Long  Island  and 
New  Jersey,  in  proportion  and  in  material. 

The  Graeme  house  at  Englewood  has  followed  the  Dutch 
materials,  although  in  proportion  it  is  more  nearly  like  the 
New  England  type,  but  the  stone  gable  ends  and  chimneys, 
the  stucco  front  and  rear,  and  the  gambrel  roof,  are  suf- 
ficient to  indicate  that  its  genesis  is  Dutch,  although  a 
two-story  Dutch  house  of  the  old  period  probably  never 


MATERIALS  «1 

had  its  full  wall  height  extending  through  the  second  story. 

The  Woodmere  Land  Companj- 's  office,  designed  by  Mr. 
Charles  Barton  Keen,  has  the  ground  floor  of  stucco,  with 
white  shingle  gable  ends  and  dormers,  and  a  brown  shingle 
roof,  and  while  it  is  one  of  the  best  examples  of  what  we 
loosely  call  "Dutch,"  it  is  in  detail  much  more  like  the 
Pennsylvania  Colonial  than  the  genuine  Dutch  work. 
The  projecting  roof  with  its  long  sweeping  curve  is  here 
transformed  into  a  break;  the  hood  over  the  entrance  door 
is  a  thing  unknown  in  the  old  work,  and  in  its  stucco  form 
and  supported  on  brackets,  is  purely  a  Pennsylvania  devel- 
opment. Mr.  Keen  has  confined  himself  in  the  wall  sur- 
faces to  two  materials,  stucco  and  shingles,  painted  white, 
diversifying  the  surface  by  shutters  of  solid  pattern,  and 
a  considerable  number  of  breaks  in  the  plan;  and  his  color 
scheme  is  of  three  colors  only,  white  for  the  shingles,  a 
slightly  yellowish  white  for  the  stucco,  and  a  soft  brown  for 
the  roof. 

It  may  be  interesting  to  note  at  this  time  that  while  the 
old  stucco  in  Pennsylvania  had  a  very  rough  surface,  the 
New  Jersey  variety  was  troweled  smooth,  like  a  white- 
finished  plaster  wall,  and  of  the  two  the  modern  architects 
have  almost  unanimously  adopted  the  rougher  surface  as 
the  more  suitable  for  the  design.  The  method  of  applica- 
tion most  in  vogue  is  to  spatter  it  on  with  a  brush-broom, 
no  troweling  being  applied  to  the  upper  coat.     The  dead 


22  THE  DUTCH  COLONIAL  HOUSE 

white  of  the  older  work  is  almost  impossible  to  get  to-day, 
not  because  the  same  materials  are  not  at  hand,  but  because 
they  are  of  little  permanence.  We  hesitate  a  long  time 
before  using  plaster  outside,  and  while  there  are  various 
white  cements  on  the  market,  there  are  none  of  them  quite 
as  white  as  plaster,  and  they  all  have,  when  used  without 
the  addition  of  coloring  matter  of  some  kind,  a  slight  bluish 
cast  which  makes  a  disagreeable  surface.  We  generally 
get  rid  of  this  color  by  mixing  a  little  yellow  ochre  with 
the  cement  mortar,  which  turns  the  mixture  a  light  ivory 
if  used  with  white  cement;  or,  when  ordinary  cement  is 
used,  a  warm  buff  is  the  result.  Curiously  enough  the 
color  of  the  sand  seems  to  have  little  effect  on  the  color  of 
stucco;  yellow  seashore  sand  and  red  river  sand  do  not,  as 
one  would  naturally  suppose,  respectively  make  a  gray  or 
brown  stucco,  but  each  with  ordinary  cement  makes  a  gray 
color,  which  without  a  little  yellow  in  it  is  rather  dreary 
and  forbidding. 

Hand-split  shingles,  similar  to  those  in  the  old  houses, 
are  neither  particularly  difficult  to  obtain,  nor  especially  ex- 
pensive, and  how  good  the  effect  of  these  shingles  can  be 
may  be  judged  by  the  Speer  house  at  Los  Angeles,  of 
which  Messrs.  Myron  Hunt  and  Elmer  Grey  were  the 
architects.  Most  of  the  modern  shingles  of  this  type  are 
cypress,  and  while  their  cost  per  thousand  is  much  greater 
than  that  of  the  ordinary  shingles,  each  shingle  covers  so 


A  summer  kitchen  of  shingles,  clapboards  and  stone.     The  front  was  once  of 

stucco 


A  detail  showing  old  stonework  and  wooden  lintels  over  windows 


MATERIALS  ftS 

much  more  space  that  the  cost  is  by  no  means  prohibitive. 
For  example,  a  good  quality  red  cedar  shingle,  sixteen 
inches  long,  costs,  in  the  neighborhood  of  New  York,  $7.50 
a  thousand,  or  three-quarters  of  a  cent  apiece,  and  covers 
on  the  wall  a  space  three  and  a  half  inches  wide  and  four 
and  a  half  inches  high — let  us  say  sixteen  square  inches. 
The  hand-rived  shingles  are  seven  inches  wide  and  twenty- 
four  inches  long;  they  cost  $22.50  a  thousand  at  New 
York,  and  cover  seventy  square  inches  when  laid  ten  inches 
to  the  weather;  in  other  words  they  cost  perhaps  three 
times  as  much  each,  and  cover  four  times  as  much  space, 
and  the  labor  of  laying  them  is  approximately  the  same. 
The  effect  with  them  is  o/  course  incomparably  better  than 
with  the  smoother  sawn  shingle. 

Several  other  houses  illustrated  in  this  chapter  show  vari- 
ous combinations  of  materials  for  the  first  story;  the  house 
at  Hewlett,  for  example,  having  gray  brick  piers  with  red 
brick  panels  below  the  triple  windows  in  the  first  story,  and 
a  stucco  extension.  In  the  Marie  house  stone  is  used  in 
connection  with  stucco  in  the  first  story,  and  shingles  above. 
These  combinations  of  materials  are  of  course  somewhat 
different  from  that  of  the  Dutch  buildings,  but  I  think  no 
one  can  deny  that  they  are  suitable  for  their  uses  and 
attractive  in  themselves.  The  methods  of  construction 
used  in  these  houses  are  not  very  different  from  those  em- 
ployed by  the  Dutch  builders,  in  that  the  walls  in  most 


24  THE  DUTCH  COLONIAL  HOUSE 

cases  are  of  masonry  up  to  the  second  floor  level,  and  above 
that  of  frame,  although  now  the  masonry,  instead  of  being 
stone,  is  terra  cotta  blocks  covered  with  stucco,  the  stone 
being  too  expensive  to  cut  and  lay  and  too  difficult  to  ob- 
tain to  permit  its  use.  The  natural  substitutes  are,  of 
course,  the  manufactured  materials,  terra  cotta,  cement  and 
brick.  The  interior  walls  and  floors  in  all  these  houses  are 
of  frame,  and  the  roofs  are  of  shingles,  as  was  the  case  in 
the  old  construction,  and  this  may  not  be  a  bad  place  to 
say  a  few  words  about  the  so-called  superior  construction 
of  Colonial  days. 

Nothing  is  more  common,  in  talking  of  old  houses,  than 
to  hear  someone  say,  "I  have  just  bought  an  old  house. 
It  is  magnificently  constructed.  You  know  they  really 
used  to  know  how  to  build  in  those  days;  they  put  the  tim- 
ber in  them,  such  as  we,  with  our  slip-shod,  cheap  build- 
ing, do  not  do."  This  in  spite  of  the  fact  that  the  supposi- 
titious house  which  has  been  bought  has  probably  all  of  its 
floors  sloping  to  various  comers,  the  walls  full  of  cracks, 
and  no  two  doors  and  windows  at  the  same  level.  It  is 
true  that  our  ancestors  did  use  better  materials;  kiln-dry- 
ing was  then  unheard  of,  and  it  was  customary,  when  a 
man  wanted  to  build  his  house,  to  go  out  into  the  woods 
and  chop  down  such  trees  as  were  suitable;  he  hewed  them 
out  by  hand,  and  left  them  to  air-dry  for  a  year  or  two 
before  he  started  work;  but  when  he  came  to  put  his  house 


MATERIALS  25 

together,  that  was  where  he  fell  short.  He  used  heavy 
timber,  it  is  true,  but  he  did  not  use  it  in  the  right  way; 
his  floor  beams  were  perhaps  six  inches  by  ten  inches, 
spaced  three  feet  apart,  but  laid  with  the  flat  side  upper- 
most. Now  the  strength  of  a  beam  varies  directly  with  its 
depth,  and  a  two-inch  by  ten-inch  beam  on  its  edge  is  much 
more  rigid  than  a  six-inch  by  ten-inch  on  its  side.  The  six- 
inch  by  ten-inch  will  sag  of  its  own  weight,  where  the  two- 
inch  by  ten-inch  will  not  sag  under  a  load  of  perhaps  a  ton. 
Besides  this,  a  number  of  smaller  beams  placed  compara- 
tively close  together  make  much  better  construction  than  a 
few  larger  ones  spaced  further  apart;  the  floor  is  more 
nearly  level,  windows  and  doors  are  less  liable  to  stick 
because  of  sagging  floors  or  ceilings,  and  partitions  resting 
on  these  beams  do  not  get  so  far  out  of  line.  In  one  old 
house  at  Farmington,  Connecticut,  I  measured  up  the  dif- 
ference in  level  at  the  two  ends  of  a  room,  and  found  that 
one  end  was  four  inches  lower  than  the  other.  This  was 
not  the  result  of  time  rotting  out  the  ends  of  the  beams, 
but  was  there  from  the  beginning,  as  was  proven  by  the 
fact  that  the  wainscot,  put  in  when  the  house  was  built, 
fitted  the  wall  perfectly,  and  all  the  moldings  and  panels 
were  larger  at  one  end  of  the  room  than  at  the  other,  in 
order  to  conceal  as  far  as  possible  the  difl*erence.  The 
same  slovenly,  or  perhaps  we  had  better  say  ignorant, 
methods  were  observable  at  the  most  important  part  of  a 


26  THE  DUTCH  COLONIAL  HOUSE 

frame  house,  where  the  sill  rests  on  the  foundation  wall. 
No  provision  was  made  to  prevent  dampness  from  enter- 
ing the  sill  and  rotting  it  out;  not  infrequently  it  rested 
directly  on  the  ground  and  the  only  reason  that  so  many 
of  the  old  houses  have  stood  up  until  to-day  is  because  the 
timber  was  thoroughly  seasoned  oak  or  chestnut,  which  is 
perhaps  as  little  liable  to  decay  as  any  wood.  Contrary 
to  the  general  belief,  I  have  no  hesitation  in  asserting  that 
any  reasonably  weU-built  frame  house  of  the  present  time, 
except  for  the  shingles,  will  last  as  long  with  as  few  repairs 
as  those  of  the  Colonial  times,  and  if  hand-rived  cypress 
shingles  are  used,  even  that  weak  spot  is  avoided. 

However,  the  era  of  frame  construction  will  soon  be  at 
an  end;  the  price  of  lumber  is  steadily  advancing,  while 
the  price  of  cement  has  experienced  a  steady  decline,  and 
before  many  years  we  will  have  seen  the  last  of  frame  con- 
struction in  those  districts  not  immediately  contiguous  to 
what  is  left  of  our  forests.  The  forerunner  of  those  days 
is  the  very  lovely  house  at  Riverdale,  designed  by  Robert 
Gardner,  illustrated  in  this  chapter,  which  is  entirely  of  fire- 
proof construction.  The  first-story  walls  of  this  building 
are  of  stone  of  excellent  shape  and  beautifully  laid;  the 
upper  walls  are  of  terra  cotta  blocks,  covered  with  cement 
stucco;  the  roof  is  of  flat  shingle  tile,  which  is,  to  my  way 
of  thinking,  of  all  tiles  the  best  suited  to  moderate-sized 
country  houses,  and  the  floors  are  of  a  combination  of  terra 


The  Lady  Moody  house  at  Gravesend,  L.  I. 

shingles  above 


Stucco  on  the  first  story  and 


A    modern  cottage  witli  Dutch  roof  and  big  columns  supporting  a  pergola-piazza 


^ 


&c 


O 


MATERIALS  27 

cotta  and  reinforced  concrete  construction.  That  this  need 
not  necessarily  eliminate  the  Dutch  Colonial  type  from  the 
list  of  possible  styles  from  which  to  draw,  in  the  days  when 
masonry  construction  is  universal,  is  better  proven  by  such 
a  concrete  example  as  this  house  than  by  all  the  abstract 
arguments  which  we  can  bring  to  bear.  The  building  is 
evidently  inspired  by  Dutch  methods,  although  they  are 
handled  in  the  freest  possible  way,  and  bear  at  most  a  very 
superficial  resemblance  to  the  prototypes;  but  when  archi- 
tecture becomes  reduced  to  mere  literal  copying  of  historic 
methods,  its  future  is  small  indeed,  and  the  true  life  and 
growth  of  an  architectural  style  is  dependent  upon  its 
treatment  in  just  such  a  manner,  both  as  to  materials  and 
to  design,  as  Mr.  Gardner  has  used  in  this  most  satisfying 
residence. 


T^he  treatment  of  the  Roof 


THE  crucial  point  in  the  design  of  any  Dutch 
house  lies  in  the  treatment  of  the  roof.  The 
principal  cause  of  the  charm  of  the  old  Dutch 
houses  was,  as  already  explained,  their  lovely  soft  roof 
lines,  and  these  have  been  rarely  reproduced  with  anything 
like  exactitude  in  current  work.  The  reason  for  this  may 
be  most  readily  explained  by  reference  to  the  accompany- 


Z>OJZMX   peOMXTS 


ing  diagram,  which  should  be  compared  with  the  end  ele- 
vation of  the  Demarest  house.  It  will  be  seen  that  only  a 
comparatively  small  portion  of  the  second  story  has  a  flat 
ceiling;  the  rest  slopes  down  to  within  two  or  three  feet  of 
the  floor,  and  dormers  (indicated  by  dotted  lines)  intended 

28 


A  New  England  <i;anil)rtl  roof  on  the  old  library  at  Stonington,  Conn. 


A  gambrel  roof  on  the  main  house  and  single-pitched  roof  on  extension 


THE  TREATMENT  OF  THE  ROOF 


99 


to  light  this  second  story  were  they  sufficiently  high  to 
allow  anyone  to  walk  into  them  without  hitting  his  head, 
would  be  very  long  at  the  top  and  would  have  triangular 
shaped  sides,  interfering  materially  with  the  lighting  of  the 
rooms  behind  them  and  cutting  off  possible  air  currents. 
Of  course  the  steeper  the  lower  part  of  the  roof  is  made, 
the  shorter  is  the  distance  from  the  window  to  the  point 


where  the  side  of  the  dormer  intersects  with  the  sloping 
wall  of  the  room.  This  flat  roof  was  a  marked  character- 
istic of  Dutch  work  and  it  is  very  seldom  that  one  of  the 
Dutch  farmhouses  has  a  roof  of  anything  like  the  character 
that  we  find  in  the  old  library  at  Stonington,  Connecticut, 
or  the  farmhouse  at  Chesterfield,  Maryland,  a  cross-section 
of  which  is  shown  in  the  second  diagram.  One  can  readily 
understand  from  this  diagram  how  much  more  available 
space  there  is  under  the  same  roof.  In  the  old  house  at 
Annapolis,  Maryland,  we  find  both  the  lower  and  upper 


30  THE  DUTCH  COLONIAL  HOUSE 

portions  made  still  sharper,  and  the  cross-section  shows 
how  a  full  square  room,  with  none  of  the  walls  sloping, 
may  be  obtained  on  the  second  story,  and  very  fair  room 
on  the  third  story. 

Any  dormer,  however,  in  a  roof  of  this  character,  where 
the  interior  wall  is  brought  back  from  the  face  of  the  win- 
dow, leaving  a  small  triangular  space  in  the  walls,  is  still 
placed  in  what  appears  a  recess  from  the  interior  of  the 
room,  which  to  some  minds  adds  picturesqueness,  and  to 
others  appears  awkward.  There  are  various  methods 
devised  for  taking  care  of  this  difficulty:  one  is  to  extend 
the  window-sill  back  to  the  face  of  the  wall  of  the  rest  of 
the  room,  so  that  the  window  itself  is  set  in  a  deep  recess, 
such  as  we  sometimes  find  in  houses  of  stone  construction, 
making  a  window-seat  below  it;  sometimes  the  window 
itself  is  set  back  flush  with  the  face  of  the  interior  wall, 
letting  the  roof  project  beyond  it  at  the  bottom;  and  some- 
times a  compromise  between  the  two  is  effected,  in  which 
the  upper  part  of  the  dormer  projects  beyond  the  roof  and 
the  lower  part  is  set  back.  Illustrations  in  this  chapter 
show  aU  of  these  various  methods,  and  as  to  a  choice  be- 
tween them,  it  may  be  said  that  too  much  depends  upon 
the  design  of  the  rest  of  the  house  to  give  any  definite 
advice.  The  recessed  or  cut-in  dormers  are  comparatively 
inconspicuous  and  can  be  used  to  supplement  the  more 
usual  type,  where  the  plan  of  the  second  story  demands 


THE  TREATMENT  OF  THE  ROOF 


81 


light  and  an  additional  dormer  would  confuse  the  com- 
position of  the  exterior.  This  three-cornered  space,  as 
shown  in  the  third  diagram,  is  not  necessarily  wasted; 
shallow  closets  could  be  put  in,  although  closets  of  this 
shape  do  not  give  very  good  hanging  space.  Chests  of 
drawers  in  which  the  drawers  get  deeper  at  the  bottom  than 


C^ae«W/qa^! 


ueas/^a' 


they  are  at  the  top  give  an  excellent  method  of  utilizing  it; 
and  where,  as  suggested  above,  the  window-sill  is  extended 
to  the  wall  line,  an  excellent  shoe  box  can  be  made  by  hing- 
ing the  sill  to  lift  up. 

Of  the  three  different  types  of  roof  illustrated  by  the 
diagrams  above,  the  third  scheme  is  often  required  by  the 
modem  housekeeper  who  needs  some  servants'  quarters — 
which  of  course  Dutch  settlers  never  had — ^as  considerable 
space  is  available  for  various  rooms  in  the  third  story. 


32  THE  DUTCH  COLONIAL  HOUSE 

Practically  all  of  the  new  houses  of  the  Dutch  type  have 
rooms  of  some  sort  in  the  third  story,  and  these  are  by  no 
means  as  uncomfortable  as  they  would  appear  to  be  from 
the  exterior.  All  of  them  have  fair-sized  windows  in  the 
rear.  Some  have  windows  in  both  the  front  and  rear,  per- 
mitting through  ventilation  of  the  rooms.  It  is  often 
argued  that  these  servants'  quarters  must  be  very  hot,  and 
in  fact  that  all  the  bedrooms  of  the  Dutch  houses  must  be 
uncomfortably  warm,  because  they  lie  under  the  roof.  It 
is  of  course  true  that  rooms  in  the  third  story  are  warmer 
than  those  of  the  first  or  second,  but  it  is  no  more  true  than 
it  is  with  any  other  type  of  house,  since  the  heat  of  the 
third  story  is  due  not  so  much  to  the  direct  warming  of  the 
rooms  by  the  sun  on  the  roof,  as  to  the  fact  that  all 
the  warm  air  in  the  house  rises  to  the  third  story  through  the 
stairways  and  halls,  and  generally  has  no  means  of  exit 
given  it.  If  in  the  ceiling  of  the  third-story  rooms 
registers  are  placed,  connecting  with  ventilators  in  the  roof, 
or  if  the  small  three-cornered  space  over  the  tops  of  the 
third-story  ceilings  is  ventilated  at  either  end,  the  heat 
which  rises  to  the  third  story  will  have  a  chance  to  escape, 
and  an  air  current  thus  passes  constantly  through  the 
house  in  a  vertical  direction.  If  the  rooms  in  the  third 
story  are  well  insulated,  say  by  eel-grass  quilt  or  hair  felt, 
or  by  some  other  material  known  to  make  good  insulation, 
the  rooms  will  be  no  more  liable  to  become  heated  from  the 


Hays  tir  lloadky,  architects 

The  Dutch  roof  raised  to  the  third  story  on  the  residence  of  Dr.  Teeter 

Englewood,  N.  J. 


Charles  Barton  Keen,  architect 

A  house  at  Woodmere,  L.   I.,  with  interesting  window  and  cliimney 

treatments 


THE  TREATMENT  OF  THE  ROOF  88 

direct  rays  of  the  sun  than  any  other  part  of  the  house. 
The  way  in  which  I  have  generally  appHed  this  insulation 
is  to  nail  it  between  the  beams  before  the  lath  is  put  on, 
and  I  have  found  it  very  effective  in  cooling  the  third 
story,  even  where  the  windows  are  rather  small  and  not 
close  to  the  tops  of  the  rooms.  Insulation  and  ventilation, 
as  described  here  for  the  third  story  of  Dutch  houses,  might 
be  used  with  advantage  on  all  third  stories,  and  were  it  so 
used  the  difficulties  of  the  servant  question  would  be  found 
to  be  very  much  less.  Adequate  provision  for  servants  in 
the  shape  of  comfortable  sleeping-rooms  is  now-a-days  re- 
quired, not  only  for  humanitarian  reasons,  but  because  the 
demand  for  competent  servants  is  so  great  that  they  can 
always  get  positions  where  they  are  comfortable;  and  while 
in  a  book  of  this  character  the  observation  may  be  out  of 
place,  I  have  invariably  found  that  clients  who  were  care- 
less of  the  comfort  of  their  servants  were  the  ones  who 
complained  most  about  the  difficulties  of  getting  them  and 
keeping  them.  In  his  "Yellow  Plush  Papers,"  Thackeray 
says  that  "Jeames  used  to  sleep  three  in  a  bed  and  six  in 
a  room,  and  was  required  to  appear  for  duty,  neat,  washed 
and  well  groomed."  It  is  no  easier  for  servants  to  dress 
and  take  care  of  themselves  in  inadequate  space  than  it  is 
for  any  of  the  rest  of  us,  and  in  this  day  when  for  economic 
reasons  employers  are  trying  to  make  their  factories  well 
lighted  and  ventilated  because  they  find  that  this  gives 


34  THE  DUTCH  COLONIAL  HOUSE 

increased  efficiency,  so  housekeepers  should  be  intelligent 
enough  to  recognize  that  a  hot,  stuffy  and  ill-ventilated 
room  affects  the  physical  condition  of  the  maid,  so  that  she 
cannot  do  a  full  day's  work.  I  believe  it  is  as  thoroughly 
a  part  of  the  architect's  duty  to  look  after  the  practical 
working  of  a  household  in  such  details  as  this  as  it  is  to 
design  an  attractive  and  artistic  exterior,  and  every  archi- 
tect who  is  worth  his  salt  feels  the  same  way  about  the 
matter. 

To  proceed  with  the  subject  of  keeping  the  rooms  under 
the  roof  cool,  the  impression  that  the  second-story  rooms 
of  a  Dutch  house  are  any  warmer  than  those  of  any  other 
type  of  building  of  frame  construction,  is  a  mistaken  one. 
The  lower  part  of  the  roof  is  constructed  in  precisely  the 
same  manner  as  are  the  vertical  walls;  that  is,  the  frame- 
work is  covered  on  the  outside  with  layers  of  boards,  build- 
ing-paper and  shingles,  and  plastered  on  the  inside.  ISTow 
it  cannot  possibly  make  any  difference  as  regards  the 
transmission  of  heat  through  this  wall  whether  it  stands  at 
ninety  degrees  with  the  floors,  or  at  eighty,  and  in  those 
houses  (to  return  to  the  third  diagram)  where  the  exposed 
walls  of  the  interior  are  vertical  and  there  is  a  triangular 
space  under  the  roof,  the  rooms  are  actually  cooler  than  in 
the  typical  Colonial  building,  because  they  have  two  walls 
between  them  and  the  sun.  Roofs  such  as  these  have  not, 
of  course,  the  grace  and  charm  of  the  flatter  and  purely 


THE  TREATMENT  OF  THE  ROOF  35 

Dutch  type,  but  they  do  fonn  a  very  admirable  compro- 
mise between  the  full  two-story  house  and  the  lower  Dutch 
type,  and  still  give  plenty  of  room  in  the  second  story. 

The  old  Dutch  farmhouses  were  undoubtedly  warm, 
since  they  had  no  windows  whatever  on  the  sides,  and  com- 
paratively smaU  ones  on  the  ends.  The  main  body  of  the 
Vreeland  house,  for  example,  is  about  fifty  feet  long;  the 
first  story  has  a  ceiling  nine  feet  or  nine  feet  and  six  inches 
high,  and  above  that  is  a  long  roof  entirely  without 
dormers.  As  this  is  one  of  the  few  old  houses  which  has 
been  preserved  in  practically  its  original  condition,  the 
curious  device  employed  for  securing  circulation  of  air  is 
worth  recording.  The  lower  story  of  the  house  is,  as  will 
be  seen  in  the  succeeding  chapter  on  interior  work,  ex- 
quisitely detailed;  arriving  at  the  head  of  the  stairs  upon 
the  second  floor,  the  whole  framework  of  the  house  is  ex- 
posed, much  as  was  the  interior  of  an  old  barn;  the  hewn 
oak  posts  and  rafters,  built  without  knowledge  of  truss 
construction  but  still  forming  a  sort  of  truss,  are  absolutely 
uncovered,  but  at  each  end  of  the  house  two  square  rooms 
are  partitioned  off,  plastered  and  left  without  ceilings. 
Looking  at  the  end  elevation  of  the  building,  we  find  three 
small  windows  at  the  top,  two  of  which  come  directly  in 
front  of  the  chimneys,  but  the  chimneys  are  built  suffi- 
ciently far  back  so  that  they  still  permit  some  light  and  air 
to  enter  the  interior.     As  the  whole  top  was  open  from  end 


36  THE  DUTCH  COLONIAL  HOUSE 

to  end,  there  was  a  free  circulation  of  air  permitted  through 
the  entire  house,  and  a  certain  amount  of  coolness  was  thus 
gained  at  the  expense  of  privacy.  I  am  unable  to  say  with 
any  certainty  as  to  whether  this  was  characteristic  of  all 
the  old  houses  or  not;  of  course,  in  many  of  them  sleeping- 
rooms  were  provided  on  the  ground  floor,  but  for  the  multi- 
tudinous children  of  our  ancestors'  families,  considerable 
accommodation  had  to  be  provided,  and  in  the  Vreeland 
house  it  was  obtained  as  above  described. 

The  requirements  of  living  in  the  earlier  days  provided 
for  a  number  of  rooms  in  the  first  story  in  excess  of  those 
above  stairs,  because  in.  the  first  place  certain  bedrooms 
were  put  on  the  first  story;  in  the  second,  the  people 
doubled  up  a  lot  more  than  they  are  inclined  to  do  now; 
and  third,  because  there  were  no  servants'  rooms.  It  is 
not  infrequent  to  find  on  the  ground  floor  of  the  old  houses 
a  parlor,  a  sitting-room,  a  dining-room,  a  kitchen,  one  or 
two  bedrooms,  and  a  store  room  big  enough  to  be  really 
called  a  room  and  not  a  closet;  while  on  the  second  floor 
two  bedrooms  were  often  the  rule,  and  the  presence  of  four 
was  a  luxury.  Now-a-days  the  same  family  would  require  a 
living-room,  dining-room,  kitchen,  a  small  pantry,  and 
possibly  a  study,  while  in  the  second  floor  they  would  want 
four  bedrooms  and  a  couple  of  bathrooms,  besides  maids' 
rooms  somewhere  in  the  house.  An  economical  distribu- 
tion of  space  requires,  therefore,  that  the  second  story  shall 


*    J '  *    >  I 


A  gable  in  the  second  story  instead  of  dormers. 

Newark,  N.  J. 


Ernest  J\  Giiilbcrt,  architect 
Mr.  Guilbert's  residence  at 


Thdodurc  Blake,  architect 
A  house  at  Greenwich,  Conn.,  with  two  full  stories 


A  house  at  Scarsdale,  N.  Y.     Dormers  half  recessed  and  half  projecting 


A  modern  edition  of  the  late  Dutch  work  at  Garden  City,  L.   I. 


THE  TREATMENT  OF  THE  ROOF  87 

be  practically  as  large  as  the  first,  and  the  maids'  rooms  as 
a  rule  are  pushed  up  into  the  third  story.  The  problem 
facing  our  architects  then,  when  they  attempt  to  work  in 
the  Dutch  style,  is  to  get  a  second  story  which  shall  be 
adequately  lighted  and  ventilated,  and  a  third  story  which, 
though  small,  will  still  contain  a  nimiber  of  servants'  rooms. 
In  the  Teeter  house  and  the  house  at  Greenwich,  this  dif- 
ficulty has  been  frankly  met  by  puttinsr  two  full  stories 
below  the  roof,  and  the  effect  is  rather  that  of  New  Eng- 
land Colonial  than  of  a  Dutch  Colonial  house,  although  in 
the  Teeter  house  the  Dutch  roof  shape,  with  its  swinging 
curve,  has  been  carefully  preserved.  In  most  of  the  other 
modern  houses  which  can  be  roughly  classified  as  Dutch, 
the  steeper  pitch  similar  to  the  New  England  and  Mary- 
land houses  illustrated  above,  has  been  adapted  success- 
fully, preserving  a  very  considerable  proportion  of  the 
space,  and  the  problem  of  the  roof  has  been  reduced  to  an 
attempt  to  discover  some  method  of  adequately  lighting  , 
the  second  story  without  cutting  up  the  roof  so  much  that 
its  original  shape  should  be  entirely  lost. 

In  the  very  charming  little  house  at  Great  Neck ,  de- 
signed by  Forman  and  Light,  the  architects  have  made  a 
serious  attempt  to  preserve  a  generally  Dutch  character, 
and  have  succeeded  in  getting  a  sufficiency  of  light  into  the 
second  story  by  using  very  wide  dormers  without  cutting 
the  roof  up  so  that  its  shape  is  entirely  lost.     This  house. 


38  THE  DUTCH  CX)LONIAL  HOUSE 

by  the  way,  is  one  of  the  most  interesting  of  those  which 
have  been  designed  in  the  Dutch  style,  since  certain  of  its 
motives  are  entirely  foreign  to  really  Dutch  work,  while 
other  parts  of  it  resemble  the  original  style  more  closely 
than  any  other  modem  house  of  which  I  have  knowledge. 
The  outside  chimney  for  example,  was,  as  far  as  I  know, 
not  a  feature  of  any  Colonial  house,  probably  because  the 
craftsmen  of  those  days,  limited  in  their  knowledge,  and 
without  proper  materials,  were  unable  to  make  the  junc- 
ture between  the  mason  work  of  the  chimney  and  the  frame 
wall  weatherproof.  The  piazza,  too,  has  the  large  round 
columns  which  have  come  to  be  almost  a  standard  feature 
of  present-day  Dutch  work,  with  the  ends  of  the  roof  beams 
projecting,  and  sawn  in  a  manner  reminiscent  of  the  Italian 
pergola,  a  resemblance  which  is  strengthened  by  the  trellis 
at  the  ends  of  the  piazzas.  On  the  other  hand,  the  lower 
part  of  the  front  below  the  hood  has  exactly  the  quality 
of  Dutch  work,  and  the  interesting  way  in  which  the  rake- 
molding,  forming  a  sort  of  cornice  on  the  gable  ends,  is 
painted  black,  has  plenty  of  good  examples  from  one  hun- 
dred years  ago. 

Quite  a  common  method  of  lighting  the  upper  story  is 
that  shown  in  the  Barber  house,  where  a  single  very  wide 
dormer  takes  in  three  rooms  in  the  interior,  and  is  roofed 
by  a  continuation  of  the  upper  slope,  the  edge  being  faced 
with  a  cornice  relieved  by  small  brackets  nlaced  each  side 


George  Nichols,  architect 
A  house  with  varied  roof  lines  at  Colonia,  N.  J. 


Plans  in  text  Forman  &  Light,  architects 

A  modern  house  with  typically  Dutch  roof  at  Kensington,  L.  I. 


THE  TREATMENT  OF  THE  ROOF  39 

of  the  windows.  The  porch  and  piazza  are  of  a  type  not 
dissimilar  from  that  of  the  Great  Neck  house,  and  the 
woodwork  of  the  whole  first  story  is  stained  brown,  but  the 
treatment  of  the  porch  and  piazzas  suggests  modern  Eng- 
lish methods  rather  than  truly  Dutch  ones,  and  the  roof 
slopes  resemble  more  nearly  those  of  the  Annapolis  house 
than  the  New  Jersey  type,  althoupfh  the  lower  ends  are 
worked  with  a  curve  as  were  the  original  ones.  Yet  the 
house  has  evidently  been  inspired  in  the  main  by  Dutch 
methods,  and,  in  spite  of  its  many  variations  from  type,  is 
an  excellent  example  of  how  far  from  the  traditional  we 
may  go  and  still  get  results  which  belong  to  the  same 
general  family  and  are  in  themselves  artistic  adaptations. 

The  residenc  of  Joseph  Norwood  at  Columbia,  South 
Carolina,  has  about  it  just  a  trace  of  Dutch  ancestry.  The 
piazza  and  porch  are  like  those  of  the  Barber  house,  but 
the  method  of  lighting  the  second  story  is  a  different  one. 
Secondary  gable  ends  have  been  introduced  instead  of  the 
long  dormers,  and  where  dormers  were  needed  they  were 
made  as  inconspicuous  as  possible  by  staining  them  to 
match  the  roof  so  as  not  to  disturb  the  general  roof 
impression. 

The  Woodmere  house,  by  Charles  Barton  Keen,  has  a 
second-story  treatment  much  like  that  of  the  Barber  house, 
but  to  light  the  third  story  another  pair  of  small  gables 
has  been  added,  and  these  have  been  so  managed,  partly 


40  THE  DUTCH  COLONIAL  HOUSE 

recessed  and  partly  projecting,  as  not  entirely  to  distract 
the  attention  from  the  roof  shape,  which  is  and  always  must 
be  the  dominant  factor  of  the  Dutch  type  of  house.  Like 
the  Great  Neck  house,  this  has  an  outside  chimney,  also 
of  stone,  which  fits  extremely  well  with  the  balance  of  the 
composition,  and  across  the  gable  end  at  the  second-story 
level  has  been  carried  the  so-called  Germantown  hood, 
which  was  sometimes  a  feature  of  the  older  Dutch  homes 
as  well  as  of  the  Pennsylvania  ones.  One  of  the  amusing 
features  of  this  extraordinarily  clever  design  is  to  be  found 
in  the  hoods  over  the  second-story  windows  in  the  gables, 
which,  with  the  strong  and  heavy  blinds,  are  characteristic 
of  Mr.  Keen's  delightfully  picturesque  houses. 

Of  course  the  most  simple  treatment  is  simply  to  run  a 
row  of  single  dormers  along  the  front  and  rear  of  these 
rooms.  This  was  done  in  the  house  at  Scarsdale  Estates, 
and  in  the  farmhouse  on  the  estate  of  Mrs.  Robert  Stafford 
at  Lloyd's  Neck,  rather  more  successfully  in  the  second 
case  than  in  the  former.  The  dormers  on  the  Lloyd's  Neck 
house  are  placed  rather  high  above  the  bottom  of  the  roof 
and  appear  slightly  attenuated  for  their  position,  but  those 
in  the  Scarsdale  Estates  house  are  a  little  too  close  together, 
and  the  photograph  was  taken  on  such  a  bright  day  that 
the  heavy  shadows  cast  by  the  dormer  roofs  rather  accentu- 
ate this  defect.  The  method  of  partly  recessing  and  partly 
projecting  the  windows  has,  in  this  Lloyd's  Neck  house, 


Mcllvain   &  Roberts,  architects 
Two  secondary  gables  and  a  long  dormer  between,  at  Cynwyd,  Pa. 


'H 

yikfe      .^I^I^^^^^H^^^^l 

ft\ 

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■lA 

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HB""1 

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-^  ^^^P^S^^^l^^^^^^^^^^H 

W'_'                '      *r'        '■■■       ■ 

r 

Edwards  &  Walter,  architects 
An  extreme  modernization  of  the  Dutch  type 


o 

o 
o 


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THE  TREATMENT  OF  THE  ROOF  41 

helped  the  interior,  since  the  vertical  wall  surface  of  the 
rooms  is  on  a  line  with  the  dormer  itself,  and  starts  to  slope 
only  at  the  point  where  the  roof  cuts  across  the  side  of  the 
dormer. 

The  house  at  Hewlett,  and  the  Bull  house,  both  illus- 
trated in  the  chapter  on  Materials  have  similar  treatment 
of  the  dormers,  but  with  the  rather  abrupt  transition  from 
the  projecting  to  the  recessed  dormer  disguised  by  a  little 
trellis  leading  up  on  either  side  of  the  windows  from  the 
flower-boxes. 

The  house  at  Cynwyd,  Pennsylvania,  has  a  little  differ- 
ent method  of  treating  the  dormers,  in  which  large  gable- 
roofed  dormers  are  placed  at  either  end  of  the  house, 
enclosing  a  long  dormer  in  the  center.  This  forms  a  com- 
position which  in  itself  is  very  agreeable,  although  it 
naturally  makes  such  an  important  motive  that  it  rather 
distracts  attention  from  the  main  roof  itself.  The  archi- 
tect of  this  house  has,  in  order  to  get  sufficient  room  in  his 
second  floor,  frankly  projected  this  story  over  the  piazza, 
a  method  which  is  usually  a  complete  failure,  but  in  this 
case  seems  to  be  a  striking  success.  The  reason  for  this 
success  is,  I  believe,  to  be  found  in  the  fact  that  he  has 
carried  his  stone  side  walls  out  to  the  face  of  the  piazza, 
opening  the  piazza  up  by  means  of  low  wide  arches  at  each 
end,  and  supporting  the  center  of  the  house  on  two  big^ 
round,  stuccoed  columns.     This  is  a  trick  of  design  which 


4«  THE  DUTCH  COLONIAL  HOUSE 

seems  to  be  peculiar  to  Philadelphia  ardiitects,  and  one 
which  might  be  adopted  with  advantage  in  many  cases 
when  the  overhang  of  the  second  story  above  the  piazza 
makes  the  whole  building  seem  insecure  and  insufficiently 
supported.  The  beautiful  stonework  of  this  house  com- 
mands respectful  attention.  Philadelphia  is  fortunate  in 
having  in  its  neighborhood  a  great  deal  of  stone  which 
readily  splits  up  into  small  horizontal  layers  and  which, 
when  laid  flat  in  a  heavy  bed  of  mortar  and  pointed  up  with 
wide  white  joints,  is  extremely  effective. 

As  before  remarked,  the  last  development  of  the  true 
Dutch  style  was  the  detaching  of  the  piazza  roof  from  the 
roof  of  the  main  house,  and  introducing  a  row  of  low  win- 
dows between  the  two.  The  house  at  Garden  City  was  de- 
signed to  retain  the  picturesque  effect  of  this  style,  but 
increasing  the  window  sizes  to  get  more  lieht  in  the  second 
story  than  could  possibly  be  obtained  from  the  little  win- 
dows of  the  type.  This  Garden  City  house  has  also  fol- 
lowed the  Dutch  work  in  the  association  of  brick,  stucco 
and  shingles  in  the  same  exterior,  and  although  the  shingled 
wing  appears  somewhat  detached  from  the  rest  of  the 
house,  it  still  has  much  the  interest  of  the  kitchen  extensions 
so  common  in  the  older  work;  in  this  case  it  is  used  for  a 
living-room,  the  ceiling  raised  completely  up  to  the  rafters. 

A  little  further  development  in  this  last  type  of  Dutch 
house  is  the  one  at  Larchmont,  New  York,  designed  by 


THE  TREATMENT  OF  THE  ROOF  48 

Messrs.  Ewing  and  Chappell,  in  which  the  central  part  of 
the  whole  roof  has  been  raised  so  as  to  give  windows  of  the 
full  size  across  the  front,  and  the  piazza  has  been  developed 
with  pairs  of  columns  with  trellis  between  them. 

Of  course  certain  exigencies  of  plan  demand  even  fuller 
lighting  of  the  second  story  than  can  be  obtained  in  any 
of  the  preceding  methods,  and  the  house  at  Colonia,  Xew 
Jersey,  designed  by  Mr.  George  Nichols,  as  well  as  the 
house  at  Newark,  designed  by  Mr.  Ernest  Guilbert  for 
his  own  occupancy,  are  unusually  good  examples  of  how 
such  informalism  in  the  treatment  of  the  roof  can  be  suc- 
cessfully accomplished.  The  Colonia  house  has  a  very 
high  central  portion  with  a  good  third  story,  while  lower 
wings  at  either  end  have  roofs  of  two  distinct  shapes.  The 
building  as  a  whole  is  so  different  from  the  accepted  type 
as  to  be  almost  bizarre,  but  it  is  an  imusually  attractive 
and  well-designed  house.  Mr.  Guilbert's  home  has  for  its 
principal  feature  a  great  two-story  room,  lighted  by  the 
studio  window  at  the  side  of  the  gable,  and  in  the  rear  by  two 
dormers,  one  perched  on  top  of  the  other,  a  composition 
which  would  not  on  paper  conmiend  itself  as  satisfactory, 
but  which  as  executed  leaves  little  to  be  desired.  This 
house  is  very  much  more  broken  up  by  projections  and 
dormers  than  most  of  the  Dutch  work,  which  as  a  rule  de- 
pends for  its  success  upon  absolute  simplicity  of  outline, 
and  the  complication  of  detail  in  this  way  requires  an  ex- 


44  THE  DUTCH  COLONIAL  HOUSE 

ceedingly  clever  man  to  make  it  successful.  Most  archi- 
tects with  a  problem  like  this  before  them  would  have 
destroyed  all  the  sense  of  peace  and  quiet  which  is  the 
distinctive  feature  of  the  Guilbert  house,  but  in  spite  of  the 
crowd  of  secondary  motives  which  succeed  in  making  each 
little  portion  of  the  house  individually  interesting,  the 
building  forms  a  single  unified  whole,  possibly  because  of 
the  reduction  of  its  color  scheme  to  white  walls  and  a  brown 
roof. 

A  more  extraordinary  contrast  to  this  than  the  cottage 
of  Miss  Maria  Grey  at  Fox  Point,  Wisconsin,  could  hardly 
be  imagined;  here  the  roof  has  been  frankly  permitted  to 
dominate  the  whole  scheme,  a  single  small  dormer  over  the 
entrance  porch  being  the  only  feature  which  breaks  up  its 
quiet  and  restful  lines.  The  architect  has  relied  abso- 
lutely upon  the  proportion  of  the  roof  and  the  accent  of 
the  chimney  to  secure  his  result;  of  ornament  there  is  none^ 
and  yet  the  house  is  no  less  successful  than  any  of  the 
others. 

In  considering  the  roof  from  the  standpoint  of  design 
then,  we  must  first  think  of  its  shape  as  seen  from  the  end, 
so  that  the  proportion  of  the  upper  and  the  lower  slopes 
may  be  agreeable,  and  then  discover  some  means  of  lighting 
the  second  story  without  detracting  too  much  from  the 
appearance  of  the  house.  The  exigencies  of  the  plan  all 
largely  determine  just  what  this  means  shall  be,  and  in 


»    ».»  i  ',  j 


Elmer  Grey,  architect 
The  simplest  possible  roof  treatment.     House  at  Fox  Point,  Wis. 


Lionel  Moses,  IL,  architect 
A  gardener's  cottage  with  a  row  of  dormers  lighting  the  second  story 


THE  TREATMENT  OF  THE  ROOF  45 

looking  over  the  illustrations  included  in  this  chapter,  I 
fail  to  find  that  any  one  method  has  much  advantage  over 
the  others.  The  Colonial  scheme  of  lighting  the  second 
story  was,  of  course,  by  dormer  windows  with  peaked  raft- 
ers when  any  dormers  were  employed  at  all.  They  were 
generally  three  in  number  and  placed  symmetrically,  but 
dormers  like  this  do  not  come  anywhere  near  fulfilling  the 
requirements  of  modem  life  as  to  liffht  and  air,  and  we 
must  accordingly  seek  some  further  means  of  lighting  the 
upper  stories.  This  may  be  done  either  by  secondary 
gables,  which,  unless  very  carefully  handled,  confuse  the 
composition,  or  by  long  dormers  covered  by  an  extension 
of  the  upper  portion  of  the  roof,  or  by  some  combination 
of  these  means.  The  recessing  of  the  dormer,  either  par- 
tially or  completely,  is  a  way  of  getting  the  window  flush 
with  the  interior  wall  that  is  sometimes  adopted,  but  put- 
ting any  considerable  number  of  these  across  the  front  of 
a  house  cuts  the  roof  to  pieces  in  a  most  unpleasant  manner. 
As  used  in  the  Orr  house,  illustrated  in  the  chapter  on 
Plan,  one  at  either  side  of  the  square  projecting  dormer 
they  are  not  disagreeable,  but  this  is  about  the  extent  of 
their  utility.  Secondary  gables,  such  as  are  found  in  the 
Guilbert  house  and  the  Norwood  house,  are  dangerous  in 
the  extreme,  and,  unless  designed  by  a  master  hand,  de- 
stroy the  simple  lines  which  in  designing  a  Dutch  house 
the  architect  so  laboriously  strives  to  build  up.     I  for  one 


46  THE  DUTCH  COLONIAL  HOUSE 

am  frankly  afraid  to  use  them,  and  I  think  in  general  the 
less  evident  the  projections  from  the  roof  are  in  the  Dutch 
type  of  house,  the  better  the  scheme  works  out. 


Doors  and  Windows 


FROM  time  immemorial  in  any  style  of  architecture 
some  special  treatment  has  been  considered  neces- 
sary for  the  doorway.  This  feeling  is  partly  in- 
spired by  the  natural  desire  to  put  the  best  foot  forward 
and  make  the  entrance  to  the  house  as  agreeable  as  possible, 
but  another  and  more  cogent  reason  is  to  attract  the  atten- 
tion of  anyone  approaching  the  building,  to  the  point  of 
entrance.  Of  course,  in  an  ordinary  white  house  the  easiest 
way  to  do  this  would  be  to  paint  the  door  a  different  and 
striking  color,  and,  as  a  matter  of  fact,  doors  are  very  fre- 
quently painted  green  when  the  rest  of  the  trim  and  even 
the  shutters  are  white.  However,  the  usual  way  is  to  frame 
the  door  with  some  composition  oi  interesting  motives  which 
shall  focus  the  interest  of  anyone  approaching  the  house 
upon  it,  and  this  decoration  must  be  carried  beyond  that  of 
any  other  part  of  the  building,  so  that  there  shall  be  no  con- 
fusion as  to  how  the  building  shall  be  entered.  In  thus 
treating  the  door  the  usual  method  is  to  employ  motives 
suitable  to  the  building  against  which  it  rests,  but  reduced 
to  a  smaller  scale,  since  the  doorway  is  the  one  portion  which 
is  usually  viewed  from  near*  "by.     Another  requirement  of 

47 


48  THE  DUTCH  COLONIAL  HOUSE 

the  doorway  is  that  it  should  afford  a  shelter  where  people 
waiting  to  enter  the  house  may  be  to  some  extent  protected 
from  the  rain.  Of  course,  in  a  great  jnany  houses  the  front 
entrance  is  from  the  piazza,  which  often  in  the  old  Dutch 
work,  as  in  modem,  extended  completely  across  the  front 
'  of  the  building.  This  is  probably  not  the  best  practice ;  the 
piazza  has  been  developed  from  Dutch  times  into  a  sort  of 
outdoor  living-room,  and  it  is  just  as  desirable  to  have  this 
somewhat  secluded  from  the  entrance  as  it  is  to  have  any  of 
the  rooms  within  the  house  entered  from  the  hall  and  not 
directly  from  outside.  This  practice  was  not  uncommon  in 
Colonial  times,  and  a  doorway  was  frequently  accessible 
only  from  a  small  porch,  which  was,  especially  when  there 
was  a  sufficient  overhang  of  the  roof,  reduced  to  a  mere 
frontispiece  applied  directly  against  the  building.  Another 
reason  for  the  embellishment  of  the  doorway  was  that  it 
constituted  a  different  problem  from  that  of  any  of  the 
other  openings  in  the  older  houses;  usually  opening  into  a 
narrow  hall  which  was  lighted  by  side  lights  and  a  fan-light. 
This  grouping  of  motives  in  itself  required  some  thought 
as  to  their  treatment,  and  the  fact  that  there  was  only  one 
door  where  there  were  a  great  many  windows,  permitted  a 
considerable  expense  which  would  have  been  impossible 
were  it  to  have  been  repeated  many  times. 

The  earlier  Dutch  houses  had  front  entrances  marked  in 
no  particular  manner;  either  there  was  not  sufficient  ability 


o 

T}     O 


TJ 


3 

o 


5  5= 


Windows  grouped  with  columns  between  on  the  Bull  house, 
Tuckahoe,  N.  Y. 


Plans  in   text 


A  recessed  porch  of  pronounced  modern  type  on  the  Orr  house  at 
Garden  City,  L.  I. 


DOORS  AND  WINDOWS  49 

to  design  or  execute  the  work,  or  the  builders  of  the  earlier 
houses  did  not  have  the  means  sufficient  to  pay  for  it;  but 
the  later  of  the  Dutch  houses  invariably  had  front  entrances 
to  which  a  good  deal  of  attention  had  been  paid.  The  nar- 
row mulHons  between  the  doors  and  windows  had  pilasters 
or  small  colunms  placed  in  front  of  them,  with  similar  col- 
umns and  pilasters  on  either  side  of  the  side  lights;  below 
the  side  lights  were  placed  panels;  and  fan-lights,  either 
over  the  door  itself,  or  over  the  door  and  side  lights  both, 
formed  an  important  part  of  the  composition.  The  older 
trim  was  carved  and  decorated  with  the  utmost  of  the  very 
considerable  artistic  skill  that  the  biulders  had,  and  the 
resulting  eiFects  were  comparable  for  beauty  with  the  Co- 
lonial work  of  any  other  part  of  the  country,  and  with  the 
best  that  we  have  in  these  days  been  able  to  develop. 

The  fan-lights  and  side  lights  were  always  divided  into 
panes  of  glass  arranged  in  a  pattern  of  some  kind  either  by 
wooden  bars — muntins,  as  they  are  called — or  by  leads ;  and 
it  was  a  curious  commentary  upon  the  construction  methods 
of  that  day  that  people  who  knew  so  little  of  metal  work 
that  the  gutters  were  of  hollowed-out  wood,  and  who  hardly 
dared  apply  dormers  because  they  did  not  know  enough 
to  make  them  watertight,  were  able  to  execute  the  compli- 
cated patterns  of  the  Colonial  leaded  glass  with  such  skill 
and  precision.  The  best  of  modem  leaded  glass  is  no  more 
neatly  done,  and  as  a  rule  less  well  designed,  than  the  Co- 


60  THE  DUTCH  COLONIAL  HOUSE 

lonial  work,  and  the  most  interesting  little  cast  lead  orna- 
ments with  wliich  these  Colonial  designers  were  wont  to 
decorate  the  intersections  of  the  leads  are  frequently  copied 
to-day  without  any  variation.  ' 

The  fan-lights,  which  are  so  attractive  and  important  a 
feature  of  the  Colonial  doors,  are  not  so  much  used  to-day 
because  we  are  unable  to  get  the  door,  the  transom  bar 
above  it,  the  fan-light  and  the  trim  above  the  fan-light,  in 
the  height  of  an  ordinary  story,  although  our  stories  are 
about  the  same  as  were  those  in  the  Colonial  houses.  They 
economized  the  space  by  making  the  doors  very  short;  a 
door  six  feet  in  height  was  not  uncommon,  and  I  would  say 
that  about  six  feet  and  four  inches  was  the  average,  while 
now,  from  six  feet  and  eight  inches  to  seven  feet  in  height 

is  considered  about  as  low  as  a  door  should  be  made. 

» 

Another  interesting  feature  of  Colonial  work  was  the 
manner  in  which  the  doors  themselves  were  paneled.  In  the 
older  doors  illustrated  in  this  chapter,  two  of  the  exterior 
ones  are  unfortunately  concealed  by  screens,  but  these  were 
similar  to  the  interior  door  of  the  Vreeland  house;  that  is, 
there  were  two  small  panels  above,  two  rather  long  panels 
in  the  center,  and  two  rather  short  panels  at  the  bottom, 
with  a  very  wide  rail  in  which  the  lock  was  set.  The 
Colonial  designers  made  this  lock  rail  wide  so  as  to  give 
space  to  the  big  rim  locks — that  is,  locks  applied  to  the  face 
of  the  door,  and  not  set  in  the  edge,  which  were  the  only 


^ 


L) 


Plans  in  text  Aymar  Embury,  II.,  architect 

The  doorway  of  the  C.  S.  Fay  house — delicate  woodwork  between  heavy  piers 


DOORS  AND  WINDOWS  61 

kind  of  which  they  knew.  Now  all  our  locks  are  set  into 
the  doors,  and  they  are  never  set  on  the  rail  because  the 
joint  between  the  rail  and  the  upright  sides  or  stiles,  as  they 
are  called,  is  the  weakest  part.  The  frame  is  there  dove- 
tailed together,  and  if  enough  is  cut  away  to  permit  the 
setting  in  of  a  lock,  the  door  is  so  much  weakened  that  it  is 
liable  to  come  loose  at  that  point.  This  seems  a  compara- 
tively trivial  reason  for  the  change  in  the  style  of  doors,  but 
there  is  an  additional  one  in  the  fact  that  when  the  young 
man  of  the  house  was  given  the  latchkey  and  the  freedom 
of  the  house,  the  key  was  often  six  or  eight  inches  long,  so 
that  it  could  pass  through  the  thick  door  and  into  the  lock 
behind  it.  Now  that  we  are  accustomed  to  the  convenience 
of  the  small  light  key  of  the  Yale  lock  we  are  not  very 
willing  to  give  it  up  for  the  sake  of  a  slight  difference  in 
the  design  of  our  front  doors. 

One  of  the  other  doorways  shows  a  different  type:  two 
long  vertical  panels  side  by  side.  This  style  of  door  is  one 
which  fits  modem  needs  well  enough,  but  is  not  nearly  as 
pretty  to  look  at  as  the  other  type,  and  was  of  a  much  later 
period,  say  about  1830. 

There  are  illustrated  in  this  chapter  five  of  the  old  doors, 
of  which  the  door  to  the  Gerretson  house  is  the  plainest  and 
probably  the  oldest,  and,  while  interesting  from  the  histori- 
cal side,  is  not  an  especially  beautiful  piece  of  design.  The 
door  to  the  Willetts  house  is  of  the  latest  period,  dating 


62  THE  DUTCH  COLONIAL  HOUSE 

from  probably  about  1830,  and  both  this  and  the  Gerretson 
door  have  the  side  lights,  square  transom  light,  fan-light 
and  doorway  itself  treated  as  a  single  opening  and  framed 
by  a  pair  of  pilasters.  Here  is  a  sort  of  architrave 
and  cornice  used  as  a  head,  and  in  it  the  Hghtness 
and  grace  of  the  earher  Dutch  work  have  been  lost  and  the 
motives  have  degenerated  into  coarser  and  less  agreeable 
ones. 

The  other  three  doors  are  all  of  about  the  same  period; 
the  Vreeland  door  is  a  New  Jersey  one,  while  the  doors  of  the 
Cortelyou  and  Lefferts  houses  are  Long  Island  examples. 
It  is  hardly  necessary  to  call  the  reader's  attention  to  the 
exquisite  beauty  of  these  three  doors;  they  are  typical  of 
the  best  Colonial  work,  in  that  the  functions  of  the  classic 
column  and  entablature  have  been  remembered,  while  the 
motives  have  been  changed  to  suit  the  artistic  conceptions 
of  their  designers.  In  the  pilasters  used  in  the  Vreeland 
house  and  the  Cortelyou  house,  the  surface  has  been  worked 
into  a  series  of  moldings  reminiscent  of  the  flutes  of  the 
classic  pilasters,  although  quite  diiferent  from  them.  The 
frieze  in  the  Vreeland  house  is  decorated  with  a  series  of 
ornaments  recalling  the  sunburst  and  daisy  patterns,  but 
worked  with  a  gouge,  and  the  architrave  around  the  fan- 
light has  in  both  cases  an  ornamental  band  quite  as  fitting 
to  its  place  as  the  classic  egg-and-dart  motive,  but  which 
was  evidently  designed  by  the  builder.     The  key-blocks  in 


e    t'«  c,"    c",.  '■"': 


be 


W 


T3 


o 


O 
O 
T3 


DOORS  AND  WINDOWS  68 

both  have  been  given  much  thought,  and  not  merely  copied 
from  some  book  of  designs. 

I  think  the  real  difference  between  Colonial  architecture 
and  that  of  any  other  period,  except  the  Italian  Renais- 
sance, is  that  it  was  designed  by  a  race  of  architects  or 
builders  who  were  without  precedent  to  follow.  They  could 
not  look  up  their  ornament  in  any  book,  because  they  had 
no  book,  but  they  did  have  a  lively  appreciation  of  the  func- 
tions of  the  column  and  entablature,  a  just  understanding 
of  the  reasons  for  the  proportions  of  these  two  members, 
and,  when  they  came  to  execute  the  work,  had  to  originate 
all  decorative  features  themselves  and  to  design  the  pro- 
portions of  the  principal  parts  either  by  eye  or  following 
those  remembered.  The  result  was  that  Colonial  architec- 
ture, like  Renaissance  architecture,  was  oftentimes  crude, 
oftentimes  badly  executed  and  badly  designed,  but  it  is 
never  uninteresting  and  never  without  indications  of  strong 
individuality  of  design.  It  is  for  this  reason  that  the 
Colonial  work  is  so  well  worth  while  studying,  not  so  much 
that  we  may  copy  it  exactly,  as  rather  that  we  too  may  feel 
free  to  forget  the  classic  training  we  have  received  in  school 
and  in  college  and  follow  the  bent  of  our  fancies. 

The  interior  doors  were  usually  very  much  plainer  than 
the  exterior,  so  plain  indeed  that  in  most  cases  they  had 
little  of  interest  about  them,  except  to  the  architect  who 
studies  his  moldings  to  obtain  minute  differences  of  shadow. 


54.  THE  DUTCH  COLONIAL  HOUSE 

the  reasons  for  which  are  not  apparent  to  one  untrained  in 
architecture,  but  we  occasionally  find  interior  doors  as 
lovely  as  the  exterior  ones.  One  of  the  best  of  these  is 
again  from  the  Vreeland  house;  it  is  similar  to  the  exterior 
door  before  illustrated,  and  conforms  to  it  in  a  like  treat- 
ment of  pilasters  and  central  fan-light.  The  beautiful 
leaded  glass  of  the  Colonial  period  is  excellently  shown  in 
this  illustration,  and  the  interesting  carved  work  of  the 
frieze  between  the  door  and  the  fan-light  is  of  the  best 
Dutch  Colonial,  and  rather  different  from  any  other  orna- 
mentation that  I  can  recall.  I  know  of  few  other  door- 
ways in  this  country,  excepting  some  of  the  Salem  ones 
designed  and  carved  by  Samuel  Mclntyre,  as  good  as  this, 
and  though  the  Mclntyre  doors  surpass  this  in  architectural 
knowledge,  and  in  beautiful  wood-carving,  this  door  for 
sheer  beauty  of  proportion  fully  holds  its  own. 

Some  modem  doorways,  also  illustrated  in  this  chapter, 
have  much  to  commend  them;  the  Fay  door  has  the  side 
lights  much  wider  than  those  of  the  typical  Colonial  work, 
some  well-designed  leaded  glass,  and  the  setting,  between 
the  heavy  stone  piers,  is  an  interesting  transition  from  the 
big  scale  of  the  house  proper  to  the  very  small  scale  of  the 
doorway. 

In  the  Orr  house  a  projecting  door  has  been  replaced  by 
a  sunken  vestibule,  with  a  couple  of  large  stucco  columns 
flanking  the  entrance.     It  is  as  little  like  genuine  Dutch 


DOORS  AND  WINDOWS  56 

architecture  as  it  is  like  English  work,  but  there  is  some- 
thing sympathetic  in  its  treatment  to  the  building  of  which 
it  forms  a  part,  and  the  sunken  vestibule  is  a  sufficiently 
good  scheme  for  affording  shelter  to  the  waiting  guest 
without  breaking  the  front  as  a  projecting  piazza  would. 
The  door  of  the  Jordan  house  is  a  thoroughly  modern  com- 
bination of  different  motives:  the  hood  is  rather  Pennsyl- 
vania Colonial  than  Dutch,  and  the  doorway  itself  cannot 
lay  claim  to  any  particular  style  as  its  precedent,  but  it 
certainly  is  well  fitted  to  the  house  on  which  it  is  placed, 
and  this  is  a  better  test  of  good  design  than  is  any 
archeological  correctness. 

The  windows  of  the  old  Dutch  farmhouses  are  never 
placed  in  pairs,  but  are  as  a  rule  uniformly  spaced  across 
the  front.  In  the  modern  work  no  such  rule  is  adopted, 
and  windows  are  placed  either  singly  or  in  pairs,  or  in  sets 
of  three,  as  the  plan  may  require  or  the  wish  of  the  designer 
dictates.  One  thing  was  invariable  in  all  the  old  work,  and 
that  is  that  the  windows  were  divided  into  small  panes,  and 
the  older  the  house,  as  a  rule,  the  smaller  the  pane  of  glass. 
The  first-story  windows  in  the  Flagg  house  at  Stowe,  Penn- 
sylvania, are  very  much  like  those  of  the  old  houses.  They 
have  six-light  sashes,  with  heavy  solid  shutters  bearing  the 
characteristic  crescent-shaped  saw-cut  in  the  upper  panel 
of  the  shutter.  The  dormer  windows  on  the  same  house  are 
truly  Colonial  dormers,  with  key-blocks  over  the  centers  of 


66  THE  DUTCH  COLONIAL  HOUSE 

the  sashes  and  painted  pediments.  In  the  Bull  house  the 
windows  are  in  sets  of  three,  in  order  to  get  as  much  sun- 
light as  possible  into  the  interior,  which  is  finished  in  dark 
wood.  As  sets  of  three  windows  in  a  house  of  this  length 
would  have  made  the  wall  appear  frail  and  insecure,  pairs 
of  columns  were  placed  between  the  windows  to  strengthen 
the  support.  Gable-end  windows  were  frequently  of  un- 
usual shapes,  and  among  those  illustrated  in  either  the  new 
or  the  old  houses  will  be  found  some  quadrant-shaped,  some 
elliptical,  and  some  with  circular  heads.  A  very  interesting 
window  in  the  gable  end  is  that  shown  in  the  old  plantation 
house,  which,  though  a  Southern  building,  has  some  of  the 
mannerisms  of  Dutch  work.  This  window  is  particularly 
well  adjusted  to  its  position,  and  though  somewhat  more 
elaborate  than  the  usual  example,  might  be  used  to  advan- 
tage in  the  modern  house  of  Dutch  character. 

Returning  again  to  the  Guilbert  house,  we  find  that  the 
windows  in  the  dormers  are  rows  of  small  casements  divided 
into  very  small  panes,  while  a  circular-headed  window  with 
side  lights  and  a  circular  transom  give  light  to  the  stairs. 

In  the  Woodmere  house  the  row  of  long  dormers  has 
been  brought  forward  to  form  a  sort  of  balcony,  with  ver- 
ticals to  support  fly-screens,  while  on  the  ground  floor  the 
porch  has  been  enclosed  in  glass. 

In  the  McDaniel  house  the  typical  Colonial  window  is 
used  with  frieze  and  cornice  above  it.     This  harmonizes 


o 


g 


tfej  mi. 


DOORS  AND  WINDOWS  67 

excellently  with  the  frontispiece  which  marks  the  doorway, 
and  is  a  simple  and  comparatively  inexpensive  way  of  filling 
up  the  space  between  the  heads  of  the  windows  and  the 
soffit  or  under  side  of  the  roof  eaves.  The  one  thing  which 
will  be  noticed  in  all  these  houses,  and  which  is  absolutely 
essential  to  a  successful  Dutch  house,  is  that  the  sash  be 
divided  into  small  panes.  The  large  sheets  of  glass  so  com- 
mon in  contractor-built  houses,  and  often  insisted  on  by 
prospective  house  builders,  because  they  are  easy  to  clean, 
do  more  to  ruin  the  exterior  of  an  otherwise  attractive  house 
than  could  the  mishandling  of  any  other  single  detail.  The 
windows  show  as  big  black  holes  in  the  wall,  and  the  one 
place  where  a  certain  delicacy  of  treatment  is  absolutely 
essential  does  not  get  it.  This  is  one  of  the  factors  of 
what  the  architects  call  "scale,"  the  meaning  of  which  I  can 
only  indicate  by  saying  that  a  well  scaled  house  is  one  in 
which  the  details  bear  a  proper  relation  to  each  other.  Of 
course,  if  one  starts  to  use  a  large  scale  and  carries  it  all 
the  way  through,  one  does  not  feel  that  there  is  anything 
out  of  the  way  in  the  scheme,  although  the  building  will 
invariably  look  smaller  than  its  actual  size,  and  the  doors 
from  a  little  distance  will  seem  too  low  for  a  man  to  pass 
through.  On  the  other  hand,  small  scale — that  is,  making 
all  the  details  small  and  the  size  of  the  windows  a  little  less 
than  ordinary,  makes  the  house  appear  bigger,  and  it  is  by 
such  devices  as  changing  the  scale  at  the  doorway  that  es- 


58  THE  DUTCH  COLONIAL  HOUSE 

pecial  attention  is  fixed  on  the  one  part.  When  one  does 
attempt  to  change  scale  at  the  doors,  one  finds  that  while 
each  member  of  the  doorway  may  be  made  a  good  deal  finer 
than  corresponding  members  in  other  parts  of  the  building, 
the  effect  from  a  little  way  off  must  be  that  of  a  size  com- 


Saw-cut  patterns  for  the  upper  panels  of  solid  shutters 

mensurate  with  the  balance  of  the  building.  It  is  a  thing 
always  hard  to  do  successfully,  and  still  harder  to  explain. 
The  shutters  or  blinds  in  the  Colonial  house  are  one  of 
the  few  features  in  which  color  can  profitably  be  employed 
and  are  as  necessary  to  the  wall  surface  as  eyebrows  to  the 
face.  Even  when,  for  practical  purposes,  they  are  not  de- 
sired, pairs  of  shutters  may  be  used  to  fill  up  blank  spaces, 
or  to  add  a  touch  of  color  to  the  white,  which  might  other- 
wise become  monotonous.  In  the  old  houses  they  are  al- 
most invariably  solid,  the  only  means  of  ventilation  being 
the  small  saw-cuts  in  the  upper  panels,  which,  though  usually 
crescent-shaped,  were  sometimes  made  in  a  variety  of  other 
interesting  forms.  Of  course  blinds  of  the  common  variety 
have  movable  slats  attached  to  a  vertical  cross-piece,  but 
these  blinds  are  so  constantly  getting  out  of  order  that  they 
are  a  source  of  a  good  deal  of  expense  and  annoyance,  es- 


An    old    Dutch    house   with    "lie-on-your-stomach"    windows 


An  old  house  in  New  Jersey  with  typical  dormer  windows 


DOORS  AND  WINDOWS  69 

pecially  as  there  is  only  one  position  in  which  they  keep  out 
the  sun  and  admit  the  air.  A  better  scheme  for  blinds,  if 
solid  ones  are  not  desired,  is  to  make  the  slats  fixed  in  this 
position,  perhaps  with  a  small  solid  panel  at  the  top  with  a 
saw-cut  similar  to  those  of  the  old  blinds.     While  it  cannot 

Saw-cut  patterns  for  the  upper  panels  of  solid  shutters 

truthfully  be  said  that  blinds  of  this  type  have  quite  the  in- 
terest that  the  old  solid  shutters  had,  they  are  a  pretty  suc- 
cessful compromise  between  the  picturesque  and  the  useful, 
since  the  square  panel  of  the  upper  part  is  always  back  of 
the  shades,  and  so  does  not  interfere  with  either  light  or  air, 
and  at  the  same  time  the  blind  has  some  interesting  feature 
about  it.  It  is  not  unusual  to  see,  in  modern  houses,  solid  ' 
shutters  on  the  first  story,  where  they  do  add  some  security 
to  the  house,  and  blinds  on  the  upper  story.  This  is  an 
appropriate  and  artistic  combination.  In  changing  the 
single  windows  of  Dutch  times  to  groups  of  double  or  triple 
windows,  we  find  it  difficult  to  make  proper  provision  for 
these  blinds.  With  double  windows  they  can  be  made  to 
fold  on  themselves,  but  in  triple  windows  nothing  can  be 
done  except  to  have  them  stand  straight  out  from  the 
house,  a  position  which  renders  them  liable  to  be  blown  off 


60  THE  DUTCH  CX)LONIAL  HOUSE 

by  heavy  winds  and  which  makes  them  always  look  untidy. 
A  house  otherwise  well  proportioned  can  be  spoiled  by 
badly  shaped  and  badly  placed  windows,  doors  and  shutters ; 
on  the  other  hand,  a  rather  poorly  proportioned  house  can 
be  redeemed  by  careful  handling  of  these  features. 


Plan 

THE  plan  of  the  old  houses  offers  nothing  of  inter- 
est or  utility  to  the  modern  designer  or  house-' 
builder,  except  the  placing  of  the  kitchen  in  a  sep- 
arate one-story  wing.  The  old  houses  almost  invariably 
had  a  narrow  central  hall  extending  through  the  building, 
with  two  rooms  opening  from  it  at  each  side;  these  rooms 
were  of  about  the  same  size,  and  their  uses  could  be  inter- 
changed without  hurting  the  plan  in  the  least.  They  had 
no  butler's  pantry  such  as  we  now  use;  in  the  early  houses 
the  kitchen  was  used  both  as  kitchen  and  dining-room,  and 
in  the  later  ones  the  kitchen  was  placed  next  to  the  dining- 
room,  with  storeroom,  pantries,  etc.,  at  the  opposite  ends  of 
the  kitchen.  A  single  straight  flight  of  stairs  led  up  one 
side  of  the  hall  to  the  second  floor.  Of  course  there  were 
some  exceptions  to  this  general  arrangement,  but  it  was  as 
a  rule  adhered  to  even  in  buildings  whose  area  was  very 
small. 

The  same  general  considerations  which  influence  modem 
planning  of  any  country  house  apply  to  the  plans  of  houses 
in  the  Dutch  style;  the  rooms  must  be  so  located  as  to  secure 
the  light  and  air  appropriate  to  each,  the  space  must  be 

61 


6^ 


THE  DUTCH  COLONIAL  HOUSE 


divided  proportionately  to  the  uses  of  the  various  rooms, 
and  access  from  the  hall  must  be  preserved — at  least  to  the 
principal  rooms — so  that  no  one  room  becomes  a  passage- 
way between  others.  The  requirements  of  living  as  they 
exist  at  present  are  for  one  large  room,  commonly  called 


First  floor  plan  of  the  Frederick  S.  Jordan  house,  Kensington,  L.  I. 

the  living-room,  which  in  small  houses  is  the  only  public 
room  except  the  dining-room;  beside  the  living-room  and 
dining-room,  a  kitchen,  pantry,  coat  closet,  two  closets  for 
the  kitchen,  and  hall  and  staircase,  filling  the  ground  floor. 
These  are  the  minimum  requirements  for  an  all-year-round 
house.  A  slightly  larger  house  has  added  to  it,  on  the 
ground  floor,  a  third  public  room,  used  either  as  a  recep- 
tion room  or  as  a  study.  The  largest  house  which  can  be 
gotten  in  the  Dutch  style  and  be  reasonably  satisfactory  in 
appearance,  includes  both  the  study  and  the  reception  room. 


PLAN  68 

in  addition  to  the  rooms  of  the  minimum  plan.  Of  course 
the  requirements  of  each  family  determine  the  number  of 
rooms  on  the  second  story;  a  small  family  would  prefer 
three  large  rooms  to  four  small  ones  in  the  smallest  house 
discussed,  while  a  larger  family  would  require  at  least  four 
smaller  rooms.  Two  bathrooms  are  now  practically  a 
necessity  in  the  American  house.  In  addition  to  these  there 
must  be  one  or  two  maids'  rooms,  and  usually  a  maids'  bath. 
It  may  be  better  to  take  up  some  of  the  plans  of  executed 
houses  and  discuss  them  with  regard  to  their  several  ar- 
rangements than  to  generalize  further  in  the  matter,  and 
for  this  purpose  I  have  selected  a  few  plans  of  various  sizes, 
each  of  which  presents  some  points  of  interest. 

The  plan  of  the  Jordan  house  is  in  many  respects  one  of 
the  most  economical  of  space,  and  satisfactory  in  arrange- 
ment, that  can  be  devised  for  a  house  of  the  minimum  re- 
quirements, and  the  size  can  of  course  be  reduced  or 
expanded  as  may  be  necessary  to  fit  the  purse  and  needs  of 
the  builder.  The  entrance  is  into  a  small  square  hall; 
directly  opposite  the  entrance  the  stairs  go  up  to  a  landing, 
turn  and  go  from  the  landing  to  the  second  story.  Wide 
doors  give  access  to  the  dining-room  at  the  left  and  the 
living-room  at  the  right,  opening  the  house  up  in  very  agree- 
able fashion,  and  making  a  hall,  which  although  small  is 
not  cramped,  because  all  of  its  sides  are  open  and  because 
each  side  is  interesting.     The  living-room  is  about  fifteen 


64) 


THE  DUTCH  COLONIAL  HOUSE 


by  twenty-four  feet,  with  a  large  fireplace,  and  French  win- 
dows either  side  of  the  fireplace  opening  to  the  west  porch. 
A  room  which  is  somewhat  longer  than  its  width  is  apt  to 
be  better  than  a  square  room  of  the  same  area;  the  furni- 
ture can  be  better  arranged,  there  is  more  wall  space,  it  is 


Second  floor  plan  of  the  Frederick  S.  Jordan  house, 
Kensington,  L.  I. 

better  lighted  and  two  or  three  groups  of  people  can  as- 
semble in  various  parts  of  the  room  without  confusion. 
The  entrance  porch  is  entirely  separate  from  the  living- 
porch  at  the  west  and  the  breakfast  porch  at  the  east,  so 
that  guests  and  messengers  coming  to  the  house  do  not  in- 
trude upon  any  family  gathering.  The  dining-room  is  fif- 
teen feet  square,  which  is  plenty  big  enough  to  accommo- 
date the  dining-table,  sideboard,  serving-table,  etc.,  and  to 
permit  the  table's  being  extended  to  seat  twelve  people, 
without  crowding  the  waitress  in  her  duties.     The  break- 


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PLAN  66 

fast  porch,  opening  from  the  dining-room,  is,  throughout 
the  summer,  a  pleasant  addition  to  any  house,  and,  glassed- 
in  and  heated  in  winter,  gives  a  bright  and  sunny  place  for 
that  most  important  meal.  The  pantry  is  of  good  size,  with 
a  refrigerator  closet  so  arranged  that  the  ice  is  put  in  from 
the  kitchen  porch,  and  the  refrigerator  entered  from  the 
pantry.  This  is  a  better  scheme  than  entering  the  ice-box 
closet  directly  from  the  kitchen,  since  many  of  the  articles 
which  are  usually  kept  in  the  ice-box^ — butter,  milk,  beer, 
cheese,  etc. — are  needed  in  the  pantry  rather  than  in  the 
kitchen.  There  is  ample  dresser  space,  so  arranged  that 
it  is  not  in  the  way  of  the  passage  between  the  kitchen  and 
the  dining-room.  The  kitchen  arrangement  I  do  not  re- 
gard as  ideal,  since  there  is  no  good  space  in  which  the 
servants'  dining-table  may  be  set  and  which  they  can  use 
as  a  sitting-room  when  not  working.  On  the  second  floor 
there  are  four  bedrooms,  and  two  bathrooms.  The  owner's 
room  has  a  fireplace,  and  communicates  directly  with  the 
so-called  study;  the  other  bathroom  is  entered  only  from 
the  hall.  In  a  house  of  this  kind  frequently  it  is  desired 
to  have  two  connections  into  each  bathroom.  This  is  a  sat- 
isfactory arrangement  as  long  as  one  adjoining  bedroom 
Only  is  in  use,  but  when  both  adjoining  bedrooms  are  occu- 
pied, is  apt  to  prove  a  source  of  considerable  annoyance, 
because  people  using  the  bathroom  very  frequently  forget 
to  unlock  the  door  that  they  have  not  used,  although  they 


66 


THE  DUTCH  COLONIAL  HOUSE 


never  forget  to  lock  it.  There  are  fair-sized  closets  for  all 
the  rooms.  In  this  house  a  single  flight  of  stairs  is  made 
to  serve  both  the  servants  and  the  owners,  a  thing  which 
would  be  objected  to  by  some  housewives,  but,  assuming  a 
single  staircase,  it  could  not  probably  be  better  arranged, 


First  floor  plan  of  the  Stanley  G.  Flagg,  Jr.,  cottage, 
Stowe,  Pa. 

since  access  to  it  from  the  kitchen  can  be  had  without  the 
servants  passing  in  view  of  the  occupants  of  either  the  liv- 
ing-room or  dining-room.  Returning  to  the  first  floor  for 
a  moment,  we  find  that  there  is  a  vista  through  the  ends  of 
the  dining-room,  living-room  and  hall,  and  the  French  win- 
dows to  the  piazzas,  and  the  main  entrance  to  these  rooms 
are  on  a  line ;  these  vistas  are  an  important  feature  of  the  in- 
terior of  any  house,  and  not  only  should  the  vista  be  pre- 
served, but  some  kind  of  an  architectural  feature  should 


PLAN 


6T 


terminate  each  vista,  the  features  in  this  case  being  the 
French  windows  opening  upon  the  porches. 

The  plan  of  the  Flagg  house  is  one  adapted  to  a  small 
family  only.  The  living-room  and  dining-room  are  each  of 
fair  size  and  placed  opposite  each  other,  and,  opening  from 
a  small  hall,  a  good-sized  pantry  communicates  with  the 


Second  floor  plan  of  the  Stanley  G.  Flagg,  Jr.,  cottage, 
Stowe,  Pa. 

kitchen,  which  is  very  well  arranged,  in  that  the  working 
part  of  the  kitchen  is  separated  from  the  rest  of  the  rooms. 
On  the  second  floor  there  are  two  rooms  for  the  owners  and 
two  for  the  servants,  with  one  bath  for  each  pair.  This 
plan  could  without  difficulty  be  adjusted  to  give  three  bed- 
rooms for  the  owners  and  one  servant's  room,  and,  if  re- 
quired, a  servant's  room  could  be  put  on  the  third  floor. 
The  back  stairs,  which  are  a  feature  of  this  plan,  could 
properly  be  eliminated  in  a  house  of  this  small  size. 


68 


THE  DUTCH  COLONIAL  HOUSE 


The  house  at  Kensington  has  a  very  unusual  type  of  plan, 
which  will  appeal  strongly  to  some  and  be  disliked  by 
others.  From  a  small  vestibule  one  enters  a  hall  eight  feet 
three  inches  wide,  which  is  indicated  by  the  ceiling  treat- 
ment rather  than  actually  divided  from  the  living-room  by 


^ 


Forman  &  Light,  architects 


First  floor  plan  of  a  house  at  Kensington,  L.   I. 

any  partition.  This  opening  up  of  the  living-room  and  hall 
together  gives  of  course  a  sense  of  space  otherwise  not  to 
be  obtained  in  so  small  a  house.  It  has  certain  disadvan- 
tages in  the  inability  of  the  hostess  to  conceal  herself  when 
not  dressed  to  receive  guests,  and  the  opening  up  of  the 
room  to  this  extent  naturally  loses  in  coziness  what  it  gains 
in  spaciousness.  The  kitchen  arrangement  is  an  excellent 
one;  the  stairs  to  the  cellar  go  down  in  the  secondary  hall 


PLAN 


69 


V 


between  the  kitchen  and  the  living-room,  so  that  the  master 
of  the  house  can  go  down  cellar  without  disturbing  the  cook 
and  her  guests.  The  kitchen  is  accessible  from  the  exterior 
only  through  an  entry,  which  some  clients  insist  upon,  much 
as  others  dislike  it.     The  second  floor  contains  three  prin- 


Forman  &  Light,  architects 
Second  floor  plan  of  a  house  at  Kensington,  L.  I. 

cipal  bedrooms  and  two  bathrooms,  and  a  servant's  room 
and  servant's  bath,  and  there  are  two  other  rooms  in  the 
third  story.  Of  course  all  four  of  these  rooms  could  be  used 
for  owner's  rooms,  and  the  servants  relegated  to  the  third 
story  entirely,  if  this  were  desired.  The  problem  of  light- 
ing and  ventilation  of  the  second  story  has  been  well  man- 


70 


THE  DUTCH  COLONIAL  HOUSE 


aged,  and  a  deck  in  the  rear,  opening  from  the  stair  landing, 
has  room  enough  for  the  usual  purposes  to  wihich  a  second- 
story  porch  is  put. 

The  McDaniel  house  is  as  well  planned  as  it  is  designed. 
The  entrance  is  from  what  is  really  the  rear  of  the  house,  a 


Taylor  &  Bonia,  architects 


First  floor  plan  of  the  McDaniel  house  and  garage  near 
Syracuse,  N.  Y. 

scheme  which  ensures  privacy  in  the  family  rooms,  and  acts 
as  a  screen  from  the  noise  and  dust  of  arriving  vehicles. 
At  the  left  of  the  carriage  entrance  is  placed  the  interesting 
curved  staircase,  with  a  connection  through  to  the  kitchen. 
A  dining-room,  morning-room  and  living-room  are  included 
in  this  plan,  and  each  of  these  rooms  is  of  good  proportion- 
ate size  and  well  shaped.  The  living-room  is  twenty-seven 
by  seventeen  feet,  the  morning-room  fifteen  by  eleven  feet, 
and  the  dining-room  about  seventeen  feet  square.    A  break- 


s      T3 


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PLAN 


71 


fast  porch  is  a  feature  of  the  plan.  The  hall  running 
through  the  house  is  always  a  delightful  thing  to  have,  es- 
pecially when,  as  in  this  case,  the  stairs  are  so  placed  as  not 
to  obstruct  the  vista.  A  large  downstairs  lavatory  is  so 
placed  as  to  be  accessible  yet  secluded,  and  the  cellar  stairs, 


Taylor  &■  Bonta,  architects 

Second  floor  plan  of  the  McDaniel  house  and  garage 
near  Syracuse,  N.  Y. 

which  are  also  entered  from  this  secondary  hall,  have  the 
advantage  mentioned  in  the  Kensington  house. 

One  admirable  feature  which  is  gradually  becoming  to 
be  more  usual  in  American  planning  is  the  connection  of  the 
house  and  garage  by  a  covered  passageway.  In  the  old 
days,  when  there  were  no  motor  cars,  and  a  stable  was  part 
of  the  equipment  of  every  complete  country  place,  the  stable 
was  kept  as  far  from  the  house  as  possible,  because  of  the 
odors  and  dirt  and  general  disagreeableness  incident  to  too 


72  THE  DUTCH  COLONIAL  HOUSE 

close  proximity  to  living-quarters.  Now,  when  a  good  clean 
motor  car  has  taken  the  place  of  a  horse,  the  garage  may 
well  be  connected  with  the  house  to  form  a  sort  of  group. 
It  not  only  adds  to  the  picturesqueness  of  the  scheme,  but 
it  also  gives  a  chance  to  go  to  the  car  in  wet  or  snowy  weather 
without  exposure  to  the  cold,  and  permits  both  of  these 
buildings  to  be  heated  by  a  single  heating  plant.  In  the 
example  illustrated  the  second  floor  contains  five  rooms,  one 
of  which  is  called  the  sewing-room,  and  the  space  under  the 
sloping  roof  is,  as  suggested  on  the  chapter  on  Roofs,  util- 
ized for  closets.  A  sleeping-porch  is  accessible  from  the 
two  principal  bedrooms  as  is  a  bath,  these  two  rooms  being 
thus  arranged  entirely  en  suite.  The  other  bedrooms  have 
a  bath  opening  only  from  the  central  hall;  servants'  rooms 
are  placed  in  the  third  story.  The  plan,  while  a  little  com- 
plicated, repays  close  study,  and  it  will  be  found  that  the 
architects  and  owners  between  them  have  worked  up  a  thor- 
oughly convenient,  attractive  and  livable  house. 

The  plan  of  the  Fay  house  includes  about  the  same  num- 
ber of  units  as  those  of  the  McDaniel  house,  but  they  are 
somewhat  larger,  and  a  convenient  location  of  the  several 
items  has  in  consequence  not  been  so  well  preserved.  The 
entrance  is  again  from  the  rear  under  the  stair  landing,  the 
stairs  go  up  at  the  left  side  of  the  hall,  and  at  the  right  side 
of  the  hall,  under  the  stair  landing,  is  placed  a  lavatory. 
Large  doors  open  from  the  hall  to  the  living-room  and  din- 


PLAN 


73 


ing-room,  each  of  which  has  its  own  fireplace.  The  study 
is  accessible  from  the  living-room  only,  an  arrangement 
which  is  not  without  its  disadvantages,  especially  in  some 
such  case  as  where  the  owner  wants  to  slip  away  to  avoid 
guests  in  the  living-room.     The  two  porches  placed  sym- 


•  nwT'  ruD^•Pu^^r• 

First  floor  plan  of  the  Charles  J.  Fay  house,  Dongan  Hills,  Staten  Island 

metrically  on  the  public  side  of  the  house  serve  as  living- 
porch  and  breakfast-porch;  the  breakfast-porch  is  accessible 
from  the  pantry  as  well  as  from  the  dining-room,  so  that 
convenient  service  is  always  possible.  The  servants'  stair- 
case goes  up  from  the  kitchen,  with  a  cellar  stair  under  it 
so  arranged  that  it  can  be  entered  from  the  outside,  thus 
doing  away  with  the  necessity  for  outside  cellar  steps,  which, 
especially  in  winter,  are  often  the  cause  of  annoyance.  The 
refrigerator  closet  at  the  right  of  the  kitchen  porch  gives  the 
iceman  a  chance  to  get  the  ice  in  without  the  necessity  for 
allowing  it  to  drip  over  the  kitchen  floor.     I  might  say  here 


74 


THE  DUTCH  COLONIAL  HOUSE 


that  it  has  been  the  cause  of  constant  amazement  to  me,  in 
the  course  of  a  fairly  extensive  practice,  to  find  how  much 
the  average  woman  dreads  the  thought  of  dripping  water 
from  ice  on  the  kitchen  floor;  Lese  majeste  is  a  light  crime 
compared  to  it,  and  I  think  that  if  the  women  could  have 


Second  floor  plan  of  the  Charles  J.  Fay  house,  Dangan  Hills,  Staten  Island 

their  way  it  would  be  put  in  a  class  with  treason  and  murder 
as  a  capital  offense.  It  is  very  well  from  some  points  of 
view  to  have  the  ice-box  filled  from  the  outside,  but  for  my 
own  part  I  want  somebody  to  know  just  how  much  tribute 
the  iceman  takes  from  the  ice-box  on  his  diurnal  calls.  This 
kitchen  is  well  arranged  in  that  it  has  through  ventilation 
and  that  enough  of  the  kitchen  is  free  to  give  the  maids  a 
place  in  which  to  eat  their  meals.  The  second  floor  has,  in 
the  main  part  of  the  house,  three  bedrooms,  two  bathrooms, 
a  dressing-room  and  a  sewing-room,  with  a  great  many 
closets;  the  kitchen  wing  in  the  second  story  is  utilized  as 
servants*  quarters,  with  three  maids'  rooms,  and  a  maids' 


PLAN  75 

bath,  and  is  shut  off  from  the  front  of  the  house  by  a  sep- 
arate servants'  hall.  Two  of  the  bedrooms  are  compara- 
tively small  rooms,  one  communicating  with  the  principal 
bedroom,  and  the  space  under  the  slope  of  the  roof  is  used 
for  closets.  Tw^  additional  guests'  bedrooms  and  bath 
are  located  in  the  third  story.  As  the  windows  in  the  front 
are  of  the  recessed  variety,  and  are  flush  with  the  wall  at 
their  sides,  the  space  below  them  was  in  this  case  used  for 
shoe  boxes.  From  the  principal  bedroom,  which  has  its 
own  fireplace,  opens  a  dressing-room,  communicating  with 
two  closets,  and  from  the  dressing-room  opens  the  bath- 
room and  one  closet.  This  gives  the  owners  a  suite  of  their 
own,  comfortable  to  the  verge  of  luxury,  and  is  especially 
useful  in  case  of  illness,  since  it  could  be  completely  closed 
off  from  the  balance  of  the  house  and  give  a  room  for  a 
trained  nurse,  with  a  bathroom  and  all  necessary  conven- 
iences. As  there  are  arrangements  made  for  attaching  a 
gas  heater,  it  would  be  possible  in  the  case  of  infectious  dis- 
eases, to  have  all  the  cooking  done  there.  The  owner's 
room  should  invariably  be  the  best  room  of  the  house  and 
have  every  possible  convenience  that  space  or  money  will 
permit.  Mrs.  Owner  occupies  the  room  at  night  and  a  good 
portion  of  every  day,  every  year;  the  children,  especially 
when  young,  sleep  in  their  rooms  and  are  in  them  little  of 
the  rest  of  the  time;  "Mother's  room"  is  their  playroom, 
no  matter  how  excellent  a  playroom  may  be  provided  for 


76  THE  DUTCH  COLONIAL  HOUSE 

them  somewhere  else.  Guests,  except  of  the  permanent 
variety,  for  whom  of  course  especial  provision  must  be  made, 
rarely  occupy  their  rooms  over  a  week,  and  these  too  are 
sleeping-places  rather  than  living-rooms.  Children's  rooms 
and  guests'  rooms  can  therefore  be  subordinated  without 


First  floor  plan  of  the  Henry  S.  Orr  house,  Garden  City,  L.  I. 

any  feeling  of  selfishness.  The  owner's  room  or  suite 
should  be  as  large  and  comfortable  as  it  can  be  made,  and, 
no  matter  what  the  size  of  the  house,  the  second  floor  should 
not  be  divided  into  rooms  of  nearly  equal  size  except  in 
those  comparatively  few  instances  where  there  is  a  family 
composed  of  three  or  four  adult  members. 

The  largest  house  of  which  I  have  thought  it  worth  while 
to  show  plans,  is  about  the  largest  to  which  the  Dutch  style 
can  be  adapted.  The  ground  floor  has  a  carriage  entrance 
at  the  rear,  with  a  little  lavatory  beside  it  in  a  secluded  and 
yet  convenient  position.  From  the  front  one  enters  a  cor- 
ridor, at  each  end  of  which  is  a  coat  closet;  at  the  left  large 
doors  open  into  the  Hving-room,  at  the  right,  to  the  dining- 


42 
•a 

I 


3 
O 

O     " 

•    o 


03 

o 


IX! 


X 


X! 


bC 


c3 


PLAN 


77 


room.  This  corridor  is  divided  into  three  parts  of  ahout 
equal  length,  with  doors  into  the  reception  room  and  study, 
and  an  arched  opening  to  the  staircase.  The  study  opens 
from  the  dining-room  as  well  as  from  the  corridor,  so  that 
it  can  he  used  as  a  smoking-room  after  meals,  a  scheme 


Second  floor  plan  of  the  Henry  S.  Orr  house,  Garden  City,  L.  I. 

which  has  perhaps  no  particular  advantage,  but  which  is 
after  all  rather  an  attractive  feature.  The  stairs  go  up 
from  the  pantry,  so  that  the  odors  of  the  kitchen  do  not  reach 
the  second  story;  the  kitchen  has  two  large  closets.  Both 
the  dining-room  and  living-room  have  fireplaces.  A  fire- 
place in  the  dining-room  is,  to  my  way  of  thinking,  a  matter 
of  appearances  rather  than  of  actual  utility;  a  fire  is  seldom 
lighted  in  it,  because  the  people  who  are  placed  in  front  of 
it  have  their  backs  scorched,  at  the  same  time  shutting  off 
the  heat  from  the  others.  In  a  house  with  four  living- 
rooms  on  the  first  story,  such  as  this  has,  the  study  and  liv- 
ing-room should  be  the  ones  for  fireplaces.  In  the  second 
story  there  are  five  bedrooms,  a  sewing-room,  three  bath- 


78  THE  DUTCH  COLONIAL  HOUSE 

rooms  and  ample  closets.  The  servants*  staircase  goes  up 
to  the  third  story  in  an  enclosed  hall,  so  that  they  have 
access  to  their  own  quarters  without  passing  through  the 
rest  of  the  house.  Two  bedrooms  and  one  bath  at  the 
kitchen  end  are  shut  off  for  the  use  of  the  children,  so  that 
when  the  door  to  their  private  hall  is  closed  the  family  can 
make  as  much  noise  as  they  like  without  disturbing  them. 
Four  of  the  five  rooms  are  either  corner  rooms  or  have 
cross  draughts,  and  three  of  them  have  fireplaces.  There 
is  a  large  linen  closet  and  a  broom  closet  on  this  floor,  be- 
sides ample  closets  for  all  bedrooms,  and  chests-of-drawers, 
etc.,  in  the  spaces  under  the  roofs.  This  house  was  of 
course  a  comparatively  expensive  house,  costing  in  the 
neighborhood  of  $20,000,  and  while  there  are  every  year 
perhaps  a  couple  of  hundred  houses  built  in  the  United  States 
which  cost  about  $50,000,  the  plans  of  such  houses  as  these 
are  so  large  and  depend  so  much  upon  the  particular  needs 
of  the  family,  and  upon  the  landscape,  that  they  jneed  not 
be  considered;  while  these  plans  are  adapted  to  people  who 
can  afford  to  spend  from  $6,000  to  $20,000  for  a  house. 

Of  course,  in  a  brief  chapter  like  this  we  can  hardly  hope 
to  do  more  than  to  illustrate  typical  plans,  but  I  have  found 
it  the  rarest  thing  in  the  world  for  one  plan  to  suit  any 
other  person  than  the  one  for  whom  it  is  designed.  Plans 
are  chiefly  useful  as  illustrating  the  possibilities  of  the  divi- 
sions of  given  space  into  rooms,  but  are  not  usually  very 


PLAN  79 

useful  in  indicating  exactly  how  this  division  should  be  fol- 
lowed. Everyone  has  some  little  individual  desire  which 
must  be  met,  and  when  one  considers  that  in  a  house  the 
size  of  the  Jordan  house  there  are  several  thousand  possible 
arrangements,  one  can  realize  how  difficult  it  is  to  endeavor 
to  show  plans  which  meet  all  conditions  of  living.  The 
general  considerations  set  forth  at  the  beginning  of  this 
chapter,  too,  apply  with  great  cogency  to  all  plans,  whether 
they  be  big  or  small,  but  in  applying  them  to  any  individual 
case  there  are  so  many  factors  of  view  or  of  ground  slope 
or  of  size  of  the  family,  or  of  location  of  windows  and  doors 
to  fit  furniture,  that  the  subject  is  too  big  to  treat  in  a  single 
chapter,  and  even  in  a  single  book,  and  I  doubt  if  a  whole 
encyclopedia  would  cover  the  ground. 

Every  house  is  a  series  of  compromises;  certain  features 
of  the  exterior  to  some  minds  are  all-important,  to  others 
negligible,  and  to  some  people  certain  considerations  look 
big  which  to  others  are  unimportant.  I  have,  during  the 
past  ten  days,  spent  twenty-four  hours  of  earnest — I  might 
even  say  prayerful — effort  to  find  a  place  for  the  kitchen 
stairs  which  would  please  one  of  my  clients.  I  found  at 
least  a  dozen  solutions  which  made  a  good  workable  plan, 
but  each  of  them  was  open  to  some  objection  which  seemed 
insuperable.  Finally  one  was  found  which  managed  to 
combine  more  good  points  and  less  bad  ones  than  any 
other,  and  the  house  is  going  ahead.     This  is  the  only  way 


80  THE  DUTCH  CX)LONIAL  HOUSE 

in  which  a  really  satisfactory  plan  can  be  obtained;  an 
architect  with  a  good  knowledge  of  planning  and  a  house- 
keeper who  knows  how  she  wants  to  keep  house — and  not 
how  the  "collective  woman"  wants  to  keep  house — can,  as 
a  rule,  between  them  find  something  which  is  very  satis- 
factory, although  neither  of  them  by  themselves  could  per- 
haps find  a  scheme  which  would  at  all  suit  the  other,  and 
certainly  neither  of  them  would  find  in  any  book  of  plans, 
no  matter  how  comprehensive,  one  which  would  meet  the 
given  requirements. 


The  Treatment  of  the  Principal  Rooms 

THE  question  of  appropriate  treatment  for  the  in- 
teriors of  houses  of  Dutch  design  is  very  much  like 
that  of  any  other  country  house  of  reasonable  size 
and  design:  for  people  of  good  taste,  they  must  be  simple, 
the  various  rooms  must  harmonize  with  each  other,  and  they 
must  be  of  a  character  which  is  distinctly  not  what  the 
decorators  call  "Period"  work.  While  this  might  seem  to 
limit  the  variety  of  interior  treatment  permissible  in  the 
Dutch  house — and  of  course  it  really  does  exclude  cer- 
tain types — in  reality  it  gives  an  opportunity  for  much 
more  freedom  of  treatment  than  is  customary  in  most 
styles.  In  a  house  of  pronounced  English  style,  and  in  the 
American  modifications  of  French  chateaux,  which  were 
only  a  few  years  ago  considered  quite  the  thing  in  our  best 
social  circles,  they  had  to  be  distinctly  Ftench.  Now 
neither  the  Elizabethan  nor  the  Louis  XIV  period  produced 
either  furniture  or  decoration  which  were  at  all  comfortable 
or  satisfactory  to  live  with,  and  as  furniture  and  decoration 
are  intimately  associated  with  interior  treatment  it  is  ex- 
ceedingly difficult  for  the  modern  American  to  be  at  all 
happy  in  them  when  they  are  carried  out  as  they  should  be. 

81 


82  THE  DUTCH  COLONIAL  HOUSE 

In  the  Dutch  farmhouse  the  first  requisite  is  for  a 
comfortable-looking  scheme,  and  the  design  will  almost 
take  care  of  itself.  One  can  introduce  whatever  furniture 
one  desires,  providing  it  is  not  too  extraordinary,  and  can 
treat  the  walls  with  dark  high  wainscot,  or  light  low  wain- 
scot, or  without  any  wainscot  at  all,  and  have  the  walls 
papered  or  without  any  paper  but  sand-finished,  and  still 
get  interiors  which  are  perfectly  in  harmony  with  the  house 
itself,  attractive  and  comfortable.  The  one  thing  which 
one  cannot  do  in  a  Dutch  house  any  more  than  in  any  other 
house,  is  to  have  all  the  rooms  designed  in  different  ways 
and  get  a  result  which  is  a  unit.  Not  very  many  years  ago 
it  was  customary  to  do  the  living-room  in  the  French  style, 
with  French  paneling,  the  dining-room  in  English  oak, 
and  the  music  room,  if  there  were  any,  in  the  Italian  style, 
and  group  these  rooms  around  a  Colonial  hall.  In  the 
smaller  houses,  where  limited  means  precluded  the  pos- 
sibility of  elaborate  interior  treatment,  the  idea  was  to  get 
everything  different.  Every  reader  will  recall  either  her- 
self or  one  of  her  friends,  in  selecting  wall  papers  for  a 
house,  picking  out  blue  for  the  dining-room  because  it  was 
so  "cheerful,"  red  for  the  den  because  it  was  so  "cozy,"  and 
green  for  the  parlor  because  "it  was  such  a  good  back- 
ground for  the  pictures,"  without  any  regard  for  how  the 
three  would  look  together.  The  same  thing  applies  to  the 
wall  treatments:  whatever  we  do  in  the  interior,  let  us  have 


Living-room  in  rough  plaster  with  hand-hewn  woodwork  in  the  Starr  house, 

Tenafly,  N.  J. 


Plans  in  text 

The  living-room  in  the  Orr  house,  treated  more  like  old  Holland  than  most 

American  interiors 


3. 


O 

<1 


TREATMENT  OF  THE  PRINCIPAL  ROOMS  83 

all  the  principal  rooms,  especially  when  these  open  up  in 
the  manner  so  common  to-day,  if  not  in  the  same  color,  at 
least  in  colors  which  do  not  fight  with  each  other. 

There  is  a  wide  latitude  of  choice  permissible  in  Dutch 
work.  Most  of  the  interiors  of  any  importance  and  for- 
mality in  Holland  are  treated  with  a  rather  rough  plaster 
and  dark  woodwork.  On  the  other  hand,  many  if  not 
most  of  our  Dutch  interiors  in  the  country  were  of  the  dis- 
tinctly Colonial  type,  with  white  wainscots,  mantels,  etc., 
and  in  some  cases  with  the  hewn  beams  of  the  second  story 
exposed.  We  have,  therefore,  without  overstepping  the 
limits  of  Dutch  work,  considerable  latitude  of  choice,  even 
though  the  style  adopted  be  carried  through  the  whole  of 
the  interior.  I  have  found  that  in  general  the  hall  is  the 
unit  most  hkely  to  fix  this  scheme,  and  that  the  preference 
of  the  majority  of  people  of  taste  and  education  is  for  a 
hall  of  Colonial  type,  possibly  treated  with  pilasters  and  a 
plaster  cornice,  but  with  the  stairs,  which  are  the  most  impor- 
tant single  feature  of  the  interior,  of  marked  Colonial  type, 
with  turned  white  balusters,  a  mahogany  rail  and  sometimes 
mahogany  treads.  Since  the  principal  rooms  open  from 
this  hall,  they  might  well  follow  the  same  scheme  and  be 
treated  in  a  more  or  less  Colonial  manner. 

In  the  average  small  house  there  is  as  a  rule  not  money 
enough  to  go  into  very  elaborate  interior  treatment;  a  few 
simple  motives  artistically  combined  must  be  made  to  pro- 


84.  THE  DUTCH  COLONIAL  HOUSE 

duce  the  maximum  of  effect,  and  these,  boiled  down,  resolve 
themselves  into  window  and  door  trim,  wlainscot,  cornices 
and  beams  for  the  ceilings.  Still,  judicious  use  of  these 
few  motives  may  be  made  to  produce  surprisingly  good  re- 
sults, even  in  the  simple  forms  possible  in  a  small  house, 
and  there  are  illustrated  in  this  chapter  some  of  their  sim- 
pler combinations. 

The  most  attractive  part  of  the  old  houses  was  unques- 
tionably the  kitchen,  for  it  was  there  that  the  family  lived 
and  worked,  and  it  is  the  living  and  working  quarters 
which  always  gather  to  themselves  the  most  personal  char- 
acter, and  hence  are  the  most  worth  studying,  since  person- 
ality, while  it  may  be  pleasant  or  the  contrary,  is  at  least 
always  interesting.  The  parlors  of  these  old  houses  seldom 
had  much  that  was  attractive  in  them,  and  however  well 
the  doors  and  windows  were  disposed,  however  good  the 
mantels  were,  or  however  excellent  was  the  treatment  of 
the  wainscot,  they  were  cold  and  forbidding.  In  the  mod- 
ern house  the  place  of  the  kitchen  has  been  taken  by  the 
living-room,  and  in  consequence  it  is  the  living-room  which 
is  the  dominant  feature  of  the  house,  and  usually  the  most 
attractive,  although  the  dining-room,  chiefly  because  the 
character  of  its  furnishings  is  definitely  fixed,  is  rarely  as 
bad  as  the  living-room  can  be,  and  for  the  same  reason  is 
seldom  as  good  as  the  living-room  can  be  made. 

Of  the  old  American  interiors  illustrated,  perhaps  the 


!/2 


3 
O 

j3 


03 

a 

Oh 
<U 

XI 


o 

O 

-si 


Ernest  P.   Guilbcrt,  architect 
A  blue  and  white  dining-room  with  red  tile  floor  in  the  Guilbert  house 


A  corner  of  the  Lady  Moody  house  hall,  showing  inconspicuous  stairs 


TREATMENT  OF  THE  PRINCIPAL  ROOMS  85 

most  interesting  is  the  Lady  Moody  house,  of  which  photo- 
graphs of  the  hall  and  living-room  are  shown.  The  ceil- 
ing in  the  first  story  of  this  house  was  not  plastered,  but 
the  heavy  beams  of  the  second  story  are  exposed,  as  is  the 
bottom  of  the  second-story  flooring;  this  has  all  been  painted 
white.  A  comer  of  the  hallway  shows  the  start  of  the  stairs, 
which  were  seldom,  in  either  the  Dutch  or  other  Colonial 
houses,  made  much  of,  and  were  often  enclosed  entirely  so 
that  heat  would  not  have  so  much  chance  to  escape  from  the 
ground  floor.  If  one  examines  the  photograph  of  this  old 
house,  one  will  find  that  the  treatment  is  of  the  very  sim- 
plest, consisting  only  of  a  beamed  ceiling  aside  from  the 
customary  base,  door  trim,  etc.  The  stairs,  of  course,  add 
something  to  the  picturesqueness  of  the  room  but  the  main 
part  of  the  effect  is  due  to  the  furnishings  and  pictures. 
The  newel  of  the  stairs  is  extended  up  to  the  bottom  of  the 
beam,  and  the  balusters  are  alternately  turned  round  and 
with  a  twisted  spiral.  The  entire  rail  of  the  stairs,  the 
treads  and  platforms  of  the  stairs,  and  the  base  are  stained 
dark,  while  the  balance  of  the  work  is  white.  The  walls 
are  covered  with  an  exceedingly  rough  plaster,  which  would 
never  pass  inspection  in  a  modem  house,  but  which,  be- 
cause of  its  very  roughness,  helped  to  decorate  the  interior. 
Smooth  plaster  must  be  covered  with  wall  paper  to  give  it 
any  richness  of  surface,  but  rough  plaster  needs  no  addi- 
tional treatment.     A  photograph  of  the  living-room  shows 


86  THE  DUTCH  COLONIAL  HOUSE 

a  floor  of  square  tiles  which  might  well  be  copied  in  such 
modem  houses  as  are  fireproof,  though  not  in  a  frame  one 
because  tiles  placed  over  wooden  beams  in  the  large  areas 
necessary  for  a  living-room  floor  are  apt  to  crack  and 
loosen,  besides  adding  tremendously  to  the  weight  which 
the  beams  of  the  first  story  have  to  carry.  I  do  not  hap- 
pen to  know  anything  about  the  construction  of  this  par- 
ticular tile  floor,  but  if  the  house  was  built  as  many  of  the 
Dutch  houses  were,  it  is  not  xmlikely  that  they  were  laid 
directly  on  the  ground.  The  ceiling  of  the  living-room  is 
beamed  like  the  hall,  and  a  wainscot,  about  four  feet  high, 
of  plain  beaded  material  without  panels,  is  carried  around 
the  room.  While  this  wainscot  looks  pretty  well  in  the 
picture,  it  is  not  an  expedient  which  can  be  advised  as  a 
precedent,  and  in  this  room  it  was  certainly  introduced  long 
after  the  rest  of  the  room  was  built,  since  the  use  of  boards 
with  beaded  edges  is  a  comparatively  recent  invention. 
The  mantel  is  an  excellent  example  of  good  Colonial  work, 
not  extremely  rich  in  character,  but  very  well  designed, 
except  for  the  columns,  which  seem  too  small  for  the  square 
entablatiu'e  over  them.  A  good  mantelpiece  does  for  a 
living-room  what  the  staircase  does  for  the  interior  as  a 
whole:  it  is  the  focal  point,  and  when  extremely 
well  designed  the  rest  of  the  room  can  go  without  any 
particular  treatment,  and  srtill  not  seem  plain  or  unfin- 
ished. 


TREATMENT  OF  THE  PRINCIPAL  ROOMS  87 

Two  other  good  rooms  in  an  old  Dutch  house  are  the  hall 
and  study  in  Mr.  Gurd's  home.  This  was  an  old  Dutch 
farmhouse  remodeled  and  modernized  hy  the  owner,  who 
is  an  architect,  but  so  carefully  done  as  in  no  way  to  disturb 
the  very  agreeable  design  of  the  old  work.  The  study  has 
a  large  fireplace  with  a  simple  mantel;  beside  this  is  a  cup- 
board with  glass  doors.  The  chimneys  in  all  the  old  houses 
were  pretty  thick  and  projected  into  the  rooms  in  a  way 
that  left  no  available  furniture  space  beside  them;  to  utilize 
this  space  properly  it  was  not  unusual  to  build  in  cupboards 
the  depth  of  the  chimneys,  and  wainscot  the  whole  end  of 
the  room,  doors  to  the  cupboards  being  formed  in  the  pan- 
eling. The  dining-room  of  the  Fry  house  is  a  good  example 
of  this  treatment,  except  that  the  doors  are  not  paneled  but 
glazed,  and  the  door  on  one  side  of  the  fireplace  leads,  not 
to  a  cupboard,  but  out  upon  the  piazza.  The  wainscot  in 
this  room,  which  appears  to  extend  from  the  floor  to  the 
ceiling,  is  in  reality  a  very  simple  and  cheap  afi^air.  The 
verticals  and  cross-pieces  are  of  wood  and  the  panels  of 
plaster,  but  with  the  whole  surface  painted  white,  the  effect 
is  the  same  as  that  of  a  wooden  wainscot,  and  the  cost  is  of 
course  infinitely  less;  as  a  result,  the  expedient  was  no  less 
satisfactory  practically  than  artistically,  since  the  wider 
panels  of  the  wooden  wainscot  are  very  apt  to  shrink  and 
show  unpainted  lines  around  their  edges.  The  fireplace  in 
this  dining-room  is  simply  framed  by  the  wainscot  with  a 


88  THE  DUTCH  COLONIAL  HOUSE 

small  shelf  above  it;  no  especial  mantel  has  been  used  or  was 
needed  around  the  brick  facing. 

Brick  is,  par  excellence,  the  proper  thing  to  use  for  the 
facings  in  the  fireplaces  of  Dutch  houses,  and  red  brick 
always  seems  more  successful  and  rational  than  buff  or 
yellow,  although  some  of  the  old  Dutch  houses  in  Holland 
had  yellow  brick  in  this  feature  of  the  interior.  Tile,  as 
material  for  fireplace  facings  and  hearths,  never  was,  and 
is  no  longer  considered,  especially  desirable,  though  once 
in  a  while  one  finds  a  fireplace  surrounded  with  Delft  tile 
which  has  a  good  deal  of  character.  A  very  beautiful  Dutch 
example  is  illustrated  in  this  chapter.  As  a  rule  it  may 
be  said  that  tile  is  too  stagey  and  artificial  to  serve  as  a 
frame  for  a  big  wood  fire,  and  this  Holland  example  was 
intended  for  a  peat  fire. 

No  old  house  that  I  have  seen  has  more  int  Testing  in- 
teriors than  those  of  the  Vreeland  house,  of  W  :ch  photo- 
graphs of  the  hall  and  sitting-room  are  shown;  The  hall 
is  square  and  the  woodwork,  once  white,  has  now  been 
painted  and  grained  to  imitate  oak,  so  that  its  teally  fine 
qualities  of  design  are  disguised  by  its  color,  as^ell  as  by 
the  unfortunate  furnishings.  The  hanging  lamp  especially 
distracts  attention  from  the  more  important  parts  of  the 
room.  Immeditely  opposite  the  entrance  door  is  a  series 
of  three  arches,  the  two  side  ones  provided  with  doors;  at 
the  left-hand  side  the  stairs  go  up  between  walls,  at  the 


»  »   .»   » 


f^  !ii 


A  simple  fireplace  in  the  stutly  of  the  Gurd  house  at  Riveredge,  X.  J. 


A  lovely  Colonial  mantel  in  the  Vreeland  house  at  Nordhotf,  N.J. 


TREATMENT  OF  THE  PRINCIPAL  ROOMS  89 

right-hand  side  a  door  opens  into  what  used  to  be  the 
kitchen,  but  is  now  the  pantry,  and  in  the  center  a  narrower 
hallway  is  continued  under  the  stair-landing  to  the  rear  en- 
trance. The  side  arches  are  semicircular,  the  center  one 
is  elhptical,  but  all  three  are  of  the  same  height  and  design. 
Rather  wide  pilasters  support  the  openings,  with  a  well- 
designed  frieze  and  cornice.  There  is  no  wainscot,  but  a 
simple  chair-rail  runs  around  the  room  and  up  the  stair- 
way, indicating,  rather  than  expressing,  the  idea  of  a  low 
wainscot.  In  the  sitting-room  is  one  of  several  very  beau- 
tiful mantels,  which,  like  most  of  the  Colonial  mantels,  is 
flat  against  the  wall,  and  is  decorated  in  a  picturesque  and 
interesting  manner  with  rosettes,  urns  and  flutes,  all  formed 
with  a  gouge.  The  flat  pilasters  which  form  the  frame  of 
the  mantel  taper  towards  the  bottom.  The  rest  of  the 
decoration  of  the  room  consists  of  a  simple  cornice,  a  very 
interesting  window  trim,  and  a  chair-rail  at  the  height  of 
the  window-sills.  As  in  the  case  of  the  hall,  this  interior 
leaves  much  to  be  desired,  since  the  big  iron  stove  is  the 
most  conspicuous  object  in  it,  and  in  its  presence  one  thinks 
more  of  its  ugliness  than  of  the  beauty  of  the  mantel  behind 
it,  but  were  these  two  rooms  decorated  and  furnished  as  are 
those  of  the  Lady  Moody  house,  they  would  be  of  unusual 
loveliness. 

Another  excellent  interior,  again  in  Mr.  Gurd's  house, 
is  the  hallway,  which  is  partly  opened  into  the  living-room. 


90  THE  DUTCH  COLONIAL  HOUSE 

The  staircase  is  of  the  simplest  Colonial  type,  with  a  round 
hand-rail  and  round  plain  balusters.  This  is,  to  my  way 
of  thinking,  an  exceedingly  well  treated  wall,  without  there 
being  any  distinctly  architectural  treatment  at  all.  It 
serves  rather  as  a  background  for  furniture  and  rugs  than 
as  a  thing  in  itself  to  be  admired. 

In  the  Orr  house  we  find  a  hall  and  living-room  of  quite 
different  type:  the  hall  is  wainscoted  to  the  top  with  long 
oak  panels,  the  upper  panels  having  decoration  in  blue  and 
gold;  the  ceiling  is  vaulted  in  groined  vaults  with  flat  ribs 
formed  in  the  plaster  across  them.  Windows  light  one 
side  of  the  room,  and  at  the  other  side  are  openings  to  the 
reception  room,  study  and  staircase.  The  living-room  has 
a  beamed  ceiling,  with  heavy  cross-beams  either  side  of  the 
fireplace  and  smaller  flat  beams  between.  The  plaster  is 
rough-finished  down  to  the  picture  molding,  and  below  that 
is  a  gold-colored  grass  cloth.  The  mantel  has  pairs  of  flat 
pilasters  at  either  side  of  the  opening,  a  series  of  panels 
above  the  shelf,  and  below  the  shelf  are  carved  scrolls  with 
a  motto.  The  fireplace  facing  is  in  this  case  of  stone,  with 
a  flat  stone  arch  instead  of  a  lintel.  Here  we  have  a  pair 
of  rooms  which  have  absolutely  nothing  of  Colonial  senti- 
ment about  them,  and  yet  they  are,  after  all,  distinctly  ap- 
propriate to  the  Dutch  house. 

The  living-room  of  the  Starr  house  presents  a  similar 
case.     The  only  strictly  architectural  treatment  consists  of 


§ 

a 

1 

to 


O 


o 
o 


h-1 


The  stairway  in  the  King  house  at  Great  Neck,  L.  I. 


Plans  in   text 

The  high  panelled  hall  in  the  Orr  house  at  Garden  City,  L.  I. 


TREATMENT  OF  THE  PRINCIPAL  ROOMS  91 

a  chair-rail,  the  window-sills  extended  out  in  front  of  the 
windows  to  form  little  shelves  to  hold  plants,  and  the 
beanied  ceiling,  which  is  of  heavy  hewn  beams  cut  out  of 
the  solid  by  a  ship's  carpenter.  The  fireplace  is  a  brick 
affair  with  a  wooden  facia  and  shelf.  There  is  not  a  mold- 
ing in  the  room,  except  the  picture  molding,  and  yet  the 
whole  effect  is  of  a  room  with  considerable  architectural 
treatment.  This  is  because  the  utility  of  the  architectural 
treatment  is  as  a  background  for  furnishing  and  decora- 
tions, and  not  a  conspicuous  piece  of  decoration  in  itself. 

Interiors  are,  in  a  way,  analogous  to  jewelry:  in  some 
rings  we  may  admire  the  setting,  in  others  the  stone;  when 
a  setting  is  the  important  thing  it  must  be  finely  detailed 
and  executed,  but  when  it  is  the  stone  which  is  to  be  dis- 
played, the  setting  must  be  appropriate  but  inconspicuous. 

One  other  room  which  is  of  excellent  Dutch  character  is 
the  dining-room  of  the  Guilbert  house.  This  has  a  tile 
floor  and  a  simple  molded  cornice,  without  any  other  archi- 
tectural treatment,  but  the  red  tile  of  the  floor,  the  dull 
blue  paper  of  the  walls,  and  the  furniture,  make  a  charming 
and  attractive  room. 

In  considering  the  problem  of  the  architectural  treat- 
ment of  the  principal  rooms,  we  have  been  discussing  what 
we  may  call  conscious  architectural  treatment,  as  dis- 
tinguished from  unconscious.  The  grouped  windows  of 
the  Guilbert  dining-room,  with  the  window-seat  below  them, 


9a  THE  DUTCH  COLONIAL  HOUSE 

are  what  may  be  termed  imconscious  architectural  treat- 
ment, and  so  in  any  room  a  good  disposition  of  the  win- 
dows and  doors,  fireplaces  well  placed  and  good  shapes  in 
the  openings,  will  do  a  lot  towards  making  an  attractive 
room,  although  a  room  which  is  bad  to  start  with  can  often 
be  made  into  a  good  room  by  wainscoting,  beamed  ceilings 
and  furniture.  The  eye  of  the  observer  can  be  distracted 
from  awkward  and  ill-placed  openings  by  objects  of  suf- 
ficient interest  and  beauty  in  themselves  to  offset  the  distaste 
caused  by  bad  fundamentals,  but  there  is  of  course  no  reason 
for  bad  fundamentals. 

Quite  a  common  type  of  living-room  is  one  which  runs 
completely  across  the  end  of  the  house,  so  placed  that  the 
fireplace  is  on  the  long  side  of  it,  with  a  window  each  side, 
two  windows  at  each  end  of  the  room,  and  the  entrance  door 
opposite  the  fireplace.  This  is  a  room  which  no  furniture 
can  make  seem  utterly  bad,  because  it  will  be  thoroughly 
well  lighted,  well  ventilated  and  will  be  easy  to  furnish,  and 
these  practical  considerations  appeal  so  strongly  to  the 
imagination  that  one's  first  thought  in  entering  a  room  will 
be,  "What  a  good  room  this  could  be  made  with  decent  fur- 
nitiu-e!"  instead  of  "What  an  ugly  room  this  is!"  This 
unconscious  fundamental  architecture  is  something  which 
cannot  be  illustrated  in  the  way  that  one  can  present  details 
of  interior  architectural  work,  but  it  is  of  even  greater 
importance. 


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Wing  chair  with  valance 


Upholstered  chair 


I 


Real  Colonial  Dutch  chairs 


3 


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Furniture  and  Decoration 


THE   question  of  furniture  and  decoration  of  a 
house  is  often  considered  outside  the  province  of 
the  architect,  just  as  is  the  planting  around  it,  and 
yet  nothing  can  do  more  to  make  a  house  successful  from 
the  exterior  than  judicious  planting,  or  from  the  interior 
than  tasteful  and  appropriate  wall  paper,  hangings  and 
furniture.     The  planting  is  the  decoration  of  the  exterior 
of  the  house,  and  while  it  is  perfectly  true  that  the  average 
architect  knows  no  more,  if  as  much,  about  plants  or  shrubs 
than  does  the  intelligent  amateur,  he  probably  realizes  more 
fully  than  a  householder  just  what  shapes,  sizes  and  colors 
of  shrubs  and  trees  can  be  disposed  about  the  building  so 
as  to  emphasize  its  strong  points  and  conceal  its  weak  ones. 
Most  architects  are  very  anxious  to  be  permitted  to  help 
in  the  selection  of  trees,  plants,  etc.,  and  are  willing  to  do 
this  work  for  a  nominal  fee,  although  I  believe  that  in  a 
place  of  any  considerable  size  the  services  of  an  expert  land- 
scape architect  should  be  secured.     He  really  knows  about 
the  construction  of  roads  to  withstand  frost,  the  length 
of  time   that  trees   and   shrubs   will  live,   the   heights   to 
which  they  will  grow,  and  a  thousand  other  little  items 

93 


94.  THE  DUTCH  COLONIAL  HOUSE 

which  represent  a  lifetime  of  study  in  themselves,  and  upon 
which  even  the  most  intelligent  architect  can  hardly  be  ex- 
pected to  advise.  So  in  interior  decoration,  too  often  a  house 
is  brought  up  to  the  point  where  the  walls  are  left  in  white 
plaster,  with  the  trim,  wainscot  and  cornices  carefully 
elaborated  by  the  architects,  perhaps  with  a  certain  color 
scheme  or  especial  type  of  wall  treatment  in  mind,  and  are 
detailed  so  as  to  be  an  appropriate  setting  for  a  certain  type 
of  furniture ;  the  client  will  then  cease  from  further  consulta- 
tion with  his  architect  and  put  on  a  wall  paper  of  brilliant 
colors  and  decided  pattern  which  will  utterly  ruin  the  effect 
of  the  most  refined  and  exquisite  detail,  when  perhaps  the 
only  thing  that  should  have  been  used  was  a  monotone 
paper  of  subdued  hue. 

The  services  of  a  decorator,  especially  in  a  large  house, 
are  often  called  in,  and  where  a  decorator  is  really  intelli- 
gent and  well  trained,  especially  when  a  part  of  his  training 
has  been  in  an  architect's  office,  he  can  improve  the  interiors 
immensely.  On  the  other  hand,  a  decorator  who  has  taken 
up  the  work  because  of  the  commercial  reward  it  offers,  and 
perhaps  because  it  is  a  gentlemanly  pursuit,  can  do  as  much 
harm  to  a  building  as  the  most  tasteless  and  ignorant  client 
who  could  possibly  be  imagined.  It  is  perfectly  true  that 
the  client  of  good  native  taste,  and  some  knowledge  and 
education  in  art  matters,  can  secure  a  result  quite  as  at- 
tractive as  can  any  architect,  but  in  my  practice  I  have 


3 

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A  Colonial  rocker 


A  Ge»rgian  armchair 


An  Adam  armchair 


A  William  and  Mary  armchair 


FURNITURE  AND  DECORATION  96 

found — and  other  members  of  my  profession  have  assured 
me  that  their  experience  has  been  similar — such  clients 
have  made  it  a  habit  to  discuss  the  scheme  of  decoration 
with  their  architect  before  proceeding  with  the  work.  Two 
heads  are  always  better  than  one,  and  an  architect  will  often 
see  possibilities  that  a  client  does  not  realize,  while  the 
client  will  often  find  some  novel  color  scheme  or  ingenious 
arrangement  of  furniture  which  is  precisely  the  thing  the 
room  needed  and  which  would  never  have  occurred  to  the 
architect. 

The  prime  requisite  in  decorating  and  furnishing  a  house 
of  any  sort  is  that  the  principal  rooms  shall  hang  together 
in  wall  treatment,  and  in  color  and  furnishings  shaU  be, 
if  not  similar,  at  least  harmonious.  I  do  not  mean  that  it 
is  necessary  to  adhere  strictly  to  the  precedent  of  any  par- 
ticular date;  in  fact  I  believe  that  too  close  following  of 
precedent  is  apt  to  result  in  a  house  which  is  rather  a 
museum  or  a  decorator's  shop  than  a  home.  Our  ancestors 
of  the  Georgian  days,  for  example,  did  not  furnish  their 
houses  throughout  in  Sheraton  or  Hepplewhite  or  Chip- 
pendale furniture;  rather  they  went  to  these  makers,  who 
were  the  best  of  their  day,  and  were  all  working  at  prac- 
tically the  same  period,  and  bought  such  furniture  as 
pleased  them,  mixing  it  together  with  such  pieces  as  be- 
longed to  their  ancestors  in  the  days  of,  let  us  say,  William 
and  Mary  or  Queen  Anne,  but  which  still  had  some  years 


96  THE  DUTCH  COLONIAL  HOUSE 

of  good  service  left  in  them.  In  just  the  same  way  we  go 
out  and  buy  old  mahogany  or  good  reproductions  and  bring 
them  home  and  put  them  in  the  same  room  with  the  Mis- 
sion chair  that  Cousin  Willie  gave  us  when  we  were  mar- 
ried', or  the  fine  old  black  walnut  "what-not"  that  was  one 
of  Mother's  wedding  presents.  In  one  thing  our  ancestors 
were  fortunate:  they  had  no  Victorian  era  behind  them,  nor 
did  they  live  in  a  day  when  ornamentation  could  be  stamped 
on  oak  chairs  by  machinery,  and  the  furniture  finished  by 
dipping  it  into  a  tank  of  shellac. 

In  furnishing  a  modern  house  most  of  us  cannot  begin 
afresh.  We  have  a  certain  amount  of  furniture  which  we 
cannot  afford  to  give  away,  and  for  which  we  must  find  a 
place.  Besides  that,  we  are  living  in  a  time  which  has 
succeeded  what  was  possibly  the  most  tasteless  era  that  the 
world  has  ever  known.  The  development  of  furniture  and 
of  decoration  up  to  the  time  of  the  late  lamented  Queen 
was  continuous,  just  as  architecture  had  been;  it  was  at 
some  times  better  than  others,  and  was  constantly  changing 
its  form,  but  it  had  never  been  distinctly  bad.  The  devel- 
opment had  been  gradual  from  the  rudest  benches  and  bed- 
steads of  the  Norman  castles,  through  the  solid,  heavy,  and 
yet  well-designed  work  of  the  Elizabethan  and  Jacobean 
periods,  through  the  exquisite  English  Georgian,  and 
through  the  American  Colonial  variations  of  it.  We  are 
now  endeavoring  to  connect  this  thread  of  tradition  with 


FURNITURE  AND  DECORATION  97 

the  present-day  furniture  in  so  far  as  such  a  thing  is  pos- 
sible after  seventy  years  of  Victorian  design.  Our  best 
furniture  manufacturers,  although  they  are  no  longer  manu- 
facturing their  furniture  by  hand,  are  seeking  for  precedent, 
not  from  the  work  of  ten  years  ago,  but  from  the  work  of 
one  hundred  or  two  hundred  years  ago,  and  the  art  of  re- 
production or  copying  of  antiques  has  reached  a  very  high 
plane  of  development,  from  which  there  is  almost  ready  to 
grow  once  again  the  art  of  designing  furniture  as  furniture 
should  be  designed. 

I  have  thought  it  better  for  the  illustrations  of  this  chap- 
ter to  take  the  designs  of  two  or  three  of  the  best  modem 
manufacturers  whose  pieces  can  be  bought  by  anyone, 
rather  than  to  illustrate  it  with  genuine  antiques,  for  whose 
purchase  one  would  have  to  compete  with  Mr.  Morgan  or 
the  Metropolitan  Museum  of  Art.  I  have,  however,  illus- 
trated two  or  three  old  Dutch  interiors,  not  from  Aknerica 
but  from  Holland,  since  practically  all  the  early  American 
furniture  was  either  imported  or  copied  from  imported 
models.  Of  course  the  largest  part  of  it  was  frankly  copied. 
I  suppose  that  of  all  the  Hepplewhite  pieces  so  common  in 
the  old  New  England  houses,  there  were  not  more  than  fifty 
direct  from  the  atelier  of  Hepplewhite,  but  Hepplewhite, 
Sheraton  and  Chippendale,  as  well  as  the  brothers  Adam, 
published  books  of  design,  which  were  sold  to  furniture 
makers  through  the  world  and  from  which  they  copied.     The 


98  THE  DUTCH  COLONIAL  HOUSE 

furniture  of  the  old  Dutch  farmhouses  was,  to  start  with, 
of  the  rudest  description — ^just  such  furniture  as  we  see 
now  in  a  lumber  camp  or  a  mountain  tavern^ — interspersed 
with  occasional  good  pieces  which  had  been  brought  from 
Holland.  The  Dutch  tradition,  however  strong  it  may 
have  been  in  architecture,  did  not  develop  any  distinct 
school  of  design;  the  farmers  around  New  Jersey  naturally 
went  to  New  York  to  make  their  purchases,  just  as  they 
do  to-day,  and  bought  whatever  was  the  prevailing  style. 
So  in  consequence,  in  such  of  the  old  farmhouses  as  Iiave 
preserved  any  of  their  original  furnishings,  we  find  they 
were  in  no  way  different  from  those  of  New  England  and 
the  South. 

The  kitchen  chairs  were  the  familiar  ladder-back  ones  of 
our  Colonial  kitchens;  for  the  better  rooms  they  used  what 
was  properly  the  English  furniture,  which  we  call  William 
and  Mary  or  Queen  Anne;  later  the  English  Georgian, 
and  finally  the  coarse  and  heavy  mahogany  furni  are  which 
forms  so  much  of  what  we  know  as  "antique  n.  hogany," 
which  was  an  American  variation  of  the  Emj  re.  This 
American  Empire  is,  to  my  way  of  thinking,  no  etter  de- 
signed than  most  of  the  Victorian  work,  althoiig  .it  was 
not  so  aggressively  ugly  and  was  redeemed  from"  complete 
degradation  by  the  beautiful  mahogany  with  whi  h  it  was 
usually  veneered. 

It  is  a  fact  not  very  generally  known  that  the  aesi^i  of 


3 

Q 


^ 

u 


pq 


M 


3 

Q 


It 


O 


O 


American  Empire  chairs 


Chairs  of  the  period  of  William  and  Mary 


FURNITURE  AND  DECORATION        99. 

English  furniture  was  greatly  influenced  by  the  influx  of 
the  Dutch  into  England  under  William  and  Mary  and 
Queen  Anne ;  the  Dutch  were  at  that  time  the  most  success- 
ful craftsmen  in  Europe,  and  certain  types  of  chairs  and  of 
highboys  were  either  copied  from  Dutch  designs  or  devel- 
oped from  them.  In  the  accompanying  plates  I  have  pre- 
ferred to'  illustrate  those  models  which  were  either  Dutch 
or  Flemish  in  design  or  copied  from  Dutch  or  Flemish 
models.  A  little  study  of  the  furniture  in  the  old  Dutch 
interiors  illustrated  will  show  how  slight  was  the  difference 
between  the  English  and  the  Dutch  types;  much  of  the  fur- 
niture shown  in  these  interiors  is  known  to  us  under  Eng- 
lish and  not  Dutch  titles,  and  the  modern  reproductions 
show  how  very  closely  the  design  of  to-day  follows  the  tra- 
ditional styles.  Of  couse  we  have  had  to  change  some  of 
the  furniture  to  fit  present-day  needs;  the  posts,  for  exam- 
ple, of  the  four-post  beds  have  become  decorative  motives 
rather  than  real  necessities;  we  no  longer  use  curtains 
around  our  beds,  because  we  no  longer  live  under  old  condi- 
tions. The  four-posters  were  originally  designed  to  meet 
a  real  need  for  privacy;  the  hall  or  corridor  from  which  all 
bedrooms  open  is  a  scheme  not  more  than  two  hundred  years 
old.  In  the  old  days  one  went  from  one  room  to  another 
directly,  and  even  in  palace  interiors  the  guard,  whenever 
it  was  changed,  had  to  go  through  the  queen's  bedroom. 
The  only  way  to  ensure  privacy  was  by  bed  curtains,  and 
for  this  reason,  as  much  as  because  the  old  houses  were 


100  THE  DUTCH  COLONIAL  HOUSE 

draughty  and  leaky,  beds  with  side  curtains  were  a  neces- 
sity. The  dining-room  extension  table  is  another  recent 
invention,  and  even  the  hinged  ends  of  gate-legged  tables 
date  from  not  very  far  back.  In  the  Colonial  period  a  pair 
of  semicircular  tables  were  for  ordinary  use  placed  close 
together,  and  when  a  number  of  people  were  expected,  a 
third  table  was  set  between  these  and  bolted  to  them. 
Sideboards  are  found  as  far  back  as  1700,  although  serving- 
tables,  in  the  present  sense,  are  much  later. 

The  complete  modern  equipment  for  the  dining-room 
consists  of  a  dining-room  table,  chairs,  armchairs,  sideboard, 
serving-table,  and  a  china  closet  or  a  highboy;  as  in  none 
of  the  historic  periods  were  all  of  these  articles  used  si- 
multaneously, the  modem  furniture  designers  havp  been  com- 
pelled to  design  along  old  lines  to  complete  this  equipment. 
The  same  thing  is  true  of  the  furniture  of  the  bedroom,  and 
we  find  a  variety  of  tables,  desks,  beds  and  bedroom  chairs, 
such  as  was  not  dreamed  of  in  Colonial  days. 

As  to  the  materials  of  the  furniture,  both  mahogany  and 
antique  oak,  finished  with  a  dull  or  wax  finish,  but  not  with 
a  high  gloss,  are  appropriate;  and  the  painted  furniture, 
decorated  with  little  flowers  and  medallions,  affords  an  in- 
teresting variety.  There  need,  however,  be  no  hesitation 
in  mixing  with  this  purely  Period  furniture  such  uphol- 
stered and  leather  chairs  as  may  be  already  in  one's  pos- 
session, or  even  willow  may  be  used.     Willow  furniture  is 


A  living-kitchen  in  Holland 


f 


A  living-room  in  the  John  A.  Gurd  house,  without  a  mantel 


A  sideboard  of  the  period  of  William  and  Mary 


A  china  closet   of  the   period   of 
William  and  Mary 


FURNITURE  AND  DECORATION  101 

of  course  a  purely  modern  invention,  but  there  is  no  loss 
of  character  in  using  a  few  pieces,  especially  if  they  are 
stained  dark;  since,  while  we  did  not  find  them  in  Dutch 
houses  we  can  be  sure  that  the  Dutch  would  have  used  them 
had  they  then  been  made. 

The  subject  of  decoration  appropriate  to  this  style  is  so 
wrapped  up  with  colors  that  it  cannot  well  be  treated  at 
much  length  in  a  purely  descriptive  article,  but  there  are 
a  few  general  principles  which  apply  to  all  houses,  and 
these  it  may  be  Worth  while  to  set  forth. 

In  the  first  place  the  character  of  the  wall  covering 
should  be  determined  by  the  sort  of  trim  employed:  if  the 
trim  is  light  and  delicate  in  character  and  has  considerable 
ornamentation  on  its  surface,  the  wall  covering  should  be 
quiet  and  unobtrusive,  either  a  monotone  grass  cloth  or  a 
two-toned  paper  of  some  variety.  An  excellent  example 
of  a  rather  elegant  trim  is  that  in  the  dining-room  of  the 
King  house,  with  which  a  simple,  brownish  gray  landscape 
paper  has  been  used  to  good  advantage.  With  a  land- 
scape paper  such  as  this,  the  hangings  should  be  of  one 
color,  and  free  from  any  decided  pattern.  Of  course  a 
landscape  or  figured  paper,  unless  of  an  all-over  pattern, 
is  a  bad  background  for  pictures,  and  where  there  are  many 
pictures  to  be  hung  a  grass  cloth  is  perhaps  the  best  wall 
treatment.  Grass  cloth  and  burlap  both  have  an  advantage 
over  wall  paper,  in  that  nails  can  be  driven  directly  into 


102  THE  DUTCH  COLONIAL  HOUSE 

the  plaster  without  cracking  it,  and  when  the  nails  are 
pulled  out  they  leave  no  conspicuous  mark.  Burlaps, 
especially  the  coarse-textiu-ed  ones,  should  hardly  be  em- 
ployed in  the  principal  rooms;  in  the  first  place,  with  the 
exception  of  those  made  by  a  comparatively  limited  num- 
ber of  manufacturers,  they  fade  badly,  and  in  the  second 
place  they  do  not  seem  exactly  appropriate  for  wall  cover- 
ing; nor  are  the  surfaces  very  interesting,  as  unless  faded, 
they  are  perfectly  uniform  in  color.  Japanese  grass  cloths 
come  in  a  wonderful  series  of  dyes,  the  colors  are  as  per- 
manent as  any  colors  can  be,  and  the  shimmer  of  light  and 
shade  on  the  surface  produces  a  background  which,  while 
unobtrusive,  is  exceedingly  beautiful.  With  grass  cloth 
or  any  other  monotone  wall  surface,  including  rough 
plaster,  chintz  or  an  English  printed  linen  would  make 
an  excellent  window  hanging.  Without  some  interesting 
variety  of  color  the  room  is  apt  to  be  dead  and  lifeless. 
An  excellent  example  of  the  agreeable  effect  which  can 
thus  be  produced  is  the  dining-room  of  the  Starr  house,  in 
which  the  walls  are  of  sand-finished  gray  plaster,  the  beams 
of  the  ceiling,  the  floor  and  the  trim  nearly  black,  and  the 
windows  hurig  with  a  bright  chintz.  The  room,  while  very 
simple  and  without  any  pictures,  has  the  effect  of  being 
very  well  decorated,  since  the  plaster  is  a  splendid  back- 
ground for  the  silver  on  the  sideboard,  the  chintzes  har- 
monize well  with  the  gray  wall  and  the  dark  trim,  and  also 


FURNITURE  AND  DECORATION  103 

with  the  mahogany  furniture,  which  of  course  belongs  to 
the  chintz  period.  Without  the  chintz  the  mahogany  fur- 
niture would  be  an  anachronism  in  a  room  of  this  char- 
acter, but  the  chintz  forms  a  connecting  link  between  the 
rather  rough  treatment  of  the  house,  and  the  exquisite  fin- 
ish of  the  mahogany. 

An  interesting  piece  of  interior  decoration  has  been  done 
in  Mr.  Gurd's  house,  where  there  is  no  mantel  at  all:  by 
following  a  trick  which  can  be  seen  in  one  of  the  old  Dutch 
interiors,  a  hanging  across  the  top  of  the  chimney  breast, 
and  hangings  down  the  side,  frame  the  fireplace,  so  that  the 
lack  of  a  mantel  is  not  felt.  This  is  an  extremely  clever 
piece  of  decoration,  but  one  which,  to  my  way  of  thinking, 
was  perhaps  unnecessary,  since  the  mantel  might  have  been 
included  in  the  scheme,  if  without  improving,  certainly 
without  injuring  it. 

Much  of  the  scheme  of  decoration  depends  upon  the 
color  of  the  room;  a  room  which  is  all  white  and  has  a  good 
deal  of  outside  light  needs  very  careful  consideration  of  its 
contents  before  they  shall  be  included,  as  every  bright 
article  will  make  the  rest  of  the  contents  seem  pale  and 
insignificant.  On  the  other  hand,  a  room  with  a  good  deal 
of  dark  woodwork  can  hardly  have  too  bright  colors  intro- 
duced into  it.  Even  the  rugs  must  be  included  in  the  color 
scheme.  With  a  Delft  blue  room,  there  is  perhaps  nothing 
so  appropriate  as  the  soft  old  blue  and  grayish  golds  of  the 


104f  THE  DUTCH  COLONIAL  HOUSE 

Chinese  rugs,  although  the  prices  of  these  are  prohibitive 
to  most  of  us ;  but  modern  imitations  of  these  in  good  color, 
and  of  comparatively  low  prices,  will  serve  equally  well. 

In  a  white  Colonial  room  with  appropriate  wall  cover- 
ings and  hangings,  the  rug  colors  must  be  extremely  quiet, 
and  my  own  preference  for  such  a  room  would  be  for  one 
of  the  black  and  gold  Persians,  which  I  believe  are  called 
Kirmanshahs,  but  for  a  room,  as  spoken  of  above,  with  a 
good  deal  of  dark  woodwork,  one  can  hardly  find  too  bril- 
liant a  rug. 

This  would  seem  not  an  inappropriate  place  to  say  a  few 
words  about  rugs.  The  study  of  rugs  is  a  tremendous 
one;  there  are  very  few  people  who  actually  know  much 
about  the  subject,  and  a  lifetime  of  investigation  may  be 
passed  with  the  discovery,  at  the  end  of  it,  that  one  is  either 
wrong  or  cannot  obtain  what  he  wants.  The  only  really 
successful  way  to  buy  rugs  is  to  go  to  a  thoroughly  repu- 
table house,  and,  without  worrying  about  the  names,  buy 
such  rugs  as  are  good  in  color,  within  the  price  possible  (if 
there  are  any  such,  which  is  generally  not  the  case),  and 
take  the  dealer's  word  for  the  quality.  I  have  spent  the 
odd  moments  of  the  last  five  years  endeavoring  to  find  out 
something  about  rugs,  and  have  at  last  made  up  my  mind 
that  it  is  a  subject  beyond  my  grasp.  No  two  experts 
have  agreed  on  any  question,  and  I  have  found  two  rugs 
which  seemed  to  me  precisely  similar  in  color  and  of  equal 


A  dining-room  in  good  Coloni.ii  style  in  the  King  house 


% 


A  dining-room  in  old  Holland 


Sand-finished  walls,  hewn  beams  and  chintz  hangings  in  the 
Starr  house 


Panelling  in  a  Holland  interior 


FURNITURE  AND  DECORATION  105 

excellence  of  design,  priced  one  at  three  times  as  much  as 
the  other. 

For  the  main  rooms  there  is  of  course  nothing  so  beauti- 
ful as  Oriental  rugs,  but  for  bedrooms  some  of  the  attrac- 
tively woven  rag  rugs  that  are  now  being  sold  by  even  the 
best  houses,  at  very  low  prices,  are  more  appropriate. 
Where  Oriental  rugs  of  suitability  cannot  be  afforded,  there 
are  carpets  now  being  woven  up  to  twelve  feet  square  in  a 
single  color,  as  well  as  the  plain  rugs  with  a  border  of  a 
different  shade  of  the  same  color,  which  are  priced  at  from 
forty  to  ninety  dollars  for  a  nine-foot  by  twelve-foot  size. 
These  last  can  be  obtained  in  any  desired  color,  since  the 
makers  when  given  a  little  notice  will  weave  them  to  order. 
In  considering  the  decoration  and  furniture,  the  floor  cov- 
erings should  be  taken  into  account  with  the  rest  of  the 
scheme. 

The  whole  question  of  interior  woodwork,  decorations 
and  furniture  should  be  taken  up  at  the  same  time,  and  no 
part  of  the  house  should  be  designed  without  reference  to 
the  others.  For  example,  in  the  photograph  of  the  corner 
of  one  of  the  Holland  rooms,  we  have  a  wall  cabinet  whose 
doors  are  ornamented  with  the  linen-fold  pattern,  which 
was  quite  a  common  method  of  treating  the  panels,  either 
in  doors  or  in  wainscot  in  the  seventeenth  century.  Panel- 
ing of  this  kind  is  absolutely  inappropriate  to  a  white  room; 
it  can  be  executed  to  the  fullest  advantage  only  in  oak, 


106  THE  DUTCH  COLONIAL  HOUSE 

stained  dark  to  imitate  the  old  work.  As  oak  and  mahog- 
any together  form  a  particularly  unpleasant  combination, 
a  design  of  this  kind  should  never  be  applied  to  a  room 
which  is  intended  to  include  mahogany  furniture  of  Colonial 
pattern;  and  following  the  principle  that  the  whole  of  the 
ground  story  should  be  designed  in  harmony,  unless  the 
rooms  are  completely  separated  from  each  other,  we  could 
hardly  have  any  really  Colonial  furniture  in  the  house  at 
all.  We  would  have  to  go  back  to  the  earlier  period  for 
our  precedent,  using  the  chairs  with  the  spiral  backs  and 
rungs,  or  some  similar  pattern  of  the  kind  known  to  the 
furniture  sellers  as  "Charles  II,"  although  all  the  European 
furniture  of  that  epoch,  including  the  Dutch,  was  very 
similar  in  character.  With  a  room  of  this  kind  we  would 
hardly  use  a  landscape  paper;  probably  a  sand-finished 
wall  with  a  good  deal  of  wainscot,  would  be  most  appro- 
priate. 

I  have  always  f oimd  that  it  is  comparatively  insignificant 
and  unimportant  details  which  finally  determine  the  choice 
of  an  interior  treatment,  and  as  we  had  precedent  in  the 
old  Dutch  houses  for  all  sorts  of  treatment,  and  as  we  find 
in  modem  Dutch  work  that  there  are  a  number  of  different 
treatments  which  seem  appropriate,  it  is  not  especially  im- 
portant what  scheme  is  selected,  just  so  it  is  properly  car- 
ried out.  I  have  even  seen  Dutch  houses  furnished  in  the 
so-called  "craftsman"  furniture  which  were  very  comfort- 


FURNITURE  AND  DECORATION  107 

able,  home-like  and  appropriate,  perhaps  because  the  better 
designed  craftsman  furniture  is  not  dissimilar  from  the 
rudest  and  roughest  of  the  home-made  Colonial.  If,  as  is 
not  infrequently  the  case,  one  has  a  few  beautiful  and  cher- 
ished family  pieces  of  antique  furniture,  these  may  properly 
determine  the  scheme  of  decoration,  and  the  wall  treatment 
can  be  designed  to  form  a  suitable  frame  and  background 
for  these  pieces  and  also  be  appropriate  to  the  Dutch  house. 
Should  any  such  condition  occur,  as  it  not  infrequently  does, 
the  client  should  inform  his  architect  in  advance,  so  that 
appropriate  provision  may  be  made  for  it,  and,  conversely, 
the  architect  should  discover  from  his  client  how  the  house 
is  to  be  furnished  before  the  interiors  are  designed.  In  one 
very  unfortunate  case  in  my  own  practice,  where  I  used  a 
comparatively  low  ceiling,  I  found  it  impossible  to  get  in 
a  pecuharly  cherished  and  beautiful  old  clock  without  re- 
moving the  top  ornament.  A  number  of  times  have  I 
heard  of  cases,  though  more  by  good  luck  than  good  man- 
agement they  have  not  been  in  my  own  work,  where  it  was 
impossible  to  get  a  four-poster  bed  up  a  winding  staircase, 
or  in  which  there  was  no  place  in  the  dining-room  big 
enough  to  set  an  unusually  large  sideboard. 

In  designing  interiors  most  people  will  find  architects 
extremely  willing  to  suit  the  design  to  their  ideas,  but  there 
sometimes  comes  a  point  where  lesser  considerations  are 
permitted  to  influence  the  client  at  the  expense  of  greater 


108  THE  DUTCH  COLONIAL  HOUSE 

ones.  Every  house  is  a  series  of  compromises.  In  the 
first  place  there  is  a  compromise  between  the  size  and  finish 
really  desired,  and  what  can  be  afforded;  and  even  were 
money  unlimited,  it  is  probably  impossible  to  plan  a  house 
which  contains  all  the  attractive  features,  or  even  the  con- 
veniences, one  would  like.  Chimneys  have  such  an  unfor- 
tunate habit  of  coming  out  in  the  wrong  place  in  the  second 
story,  the  stairs  take  up  such  a  lot  of  room  that  could  be  so 
well  employed  if  they  were  not  necessary,  and  the  house 
becomes  rather  a  question  of  what  one  can  get,  than  of  what 
one  wants.  I  think  that  an  architect  probably  knows  as 
much  about  how  to  live  as  does  a  member  of  any  other  class, 
but  I  never  found  an  architect  yet  who  was  satisfied  with 
his  own  house,  or  felt  that  he  had  gotten  everything  in  it 
that  he  wanted,  although  most  of  us  feel  that  we  have  gotten 
in  our  houses  everything  that  is  possible.  Another  thing 
that  people  are  too  apt  to  forget  is  that  they  are  perfectly 
willing,  in  a  rented  house,  to  put  up  with  a  number  of  in- 
conveniences in  money-saving  devices,  which  they  will  not 
consider  for  a  moment  in  a  house  they  are  building  for 
themselves.  Thus,  the  familiar  saying,  "It  is  cheaper  to 
rent  than  to  build,"  is  one  of  only  partial  truth,  since  you 
do  not  rent  anything  like  the  quality  that  you  build. 


7 


TTUf* 


WHICF 


7  PAY  '"SE 


owFn 


T71 


14  DAY  USE 

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LOAN  DEPT. 


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